Henry Soenarko | My Amplog

Back in 1973, Duracell developed an advertising campaign to communicate that its alkaline batteries lasted much longer than ordinary and inexpensive zinc carbon batteries. A small pink and fluffy bunny was created, who was able to outlast all others in an array of colourful challenges. The Duracell Bunny made his debut appearance in the US 35 years ago, in a commercial that included a group of drum-banging bunnies. The clear winner was - as you might have guessed - the Duracell powered Drumming Bunny, who was unstoppable.



Throughout the years, Duracell has followed a coherent advertising strategy continuing to evolve the bunny. With unparalleled endurance, the bunny appeared to be a natural at skiing, kayaking, boxing, football and marathons.

To promote their new line of powerful alkaline batteries, Duracell has recently unveiled a new “Power Bunny”. He has the same engaging personality, but is represented in a “herd of bunnies” coming together to form metaphors of power and strength. The newest Duracell Batteries commercial titled “Bunny Fusion” is an explosion of pink bunnies. Advertising agency Ogilvy Paris hired the new creative group Chuck & Lulu to produce animation, live-action, print and art installations. Their first project was directed by Pleix.

Pleix about Bunny Fusion
Ogilvy Paris wanted something dynamic and playful, an orgy of cute bunnies forming powerful entities. The Duracell bunny character is already very well established so we decided to stay pretty close to the original design. However we reinterpreted the old design making sure it could enjoy more flexibility than the original stop-motion puppet. We definitely aimed for a cute feeling, we wanted them soft and pink and we were excited about the visual aspect of that pink bunny crowd against a bright and minimal background. The sumo, elephant and train are power symbols requested by the advertising agency since they already used these on some parallel Duracell (print) projects.
Almost everything was made with Autodesk 3DSMax (modelling, animation and rendering) and a couple of third party software programs (Thinking Particles, Vray and RealFlow). Thinking Particles was used to control the behaviour of thousands of bunnies going from one entity to another. It was very tricky to find the good way to make them move all together in a nice way. Thousands of bunnies had to go from the waterfall to the tornado then to the sumo, and it was a real nightmare to fine tune and manage. Hopefully, thanks to really patient CG (Computer Graphics) graphists, we succeeded to get something more than OK.
We encountered some technical difficulties on the tornado and the sumo because each bunny had its own animation cycle, and we got some memory overflows at some point - dozen of gigaytes of memory cache for each frame to deal with. Vray was used to render the film. The lighting is very simple, a diffused skylight and a dimmed sunlight to create some subtle shadows, and some CG fur on the closest bunnies. We also used RealFlow to create the waterfall swirl and some extra bunnies hanging to the giant sumo.

Advertising Agency: Ogilvy, Paris. Executive Creative Director: Chris Garbutt. Creative Director: Nick Hine. Art Director: Antoaneta Metchanova. Production Company: Chuck & Lulu. Director: Pleix. Executive Producer: Edward Grann. Post Production: Digital District, Paris Music: Apollo Studios, Montreal.