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AARDMAN
ANIMATIONS MAKE THE DURACELL BUNNY GO ALL LE PARKOUR.
DIRECTED BY LOUIS COOK.
We're
sure nearly everybody involved with parkour and freerunning
in the UK has seen the Duracell Bunny ripping up a typical
London
suburb. Not all will know however that people behind the
TV Commercial are from the same animation company that
created Wallace and Gromit.
Advertising agency Olgivy and Mather requested a guerilla-style
look which immediately put Cook and his team in mind of
the hardscrabble Bristol neighborhoods that surround Aardman
headquarters.
Over three days, and in spite of some seriously adverse
weather patterns, the Aardman team shot intentionally
wobbly, handheld footage over the Bristol rooftops.
Cook took the unusual step of using shots of the urban
landscape to create a storyboard. Only after shooting
the live footage did Cook put his mind towards the seamless
addition of the pink, furry bunny.
"Our process was a little risky, but it ended up
working out well," he says. "We shot lots of
DV footage when we weren't waiting around for the rain
to stop. We performed some careful and precise tracking
on the live footage before creating our CG bunny.
We then rotoscoped the CG animations into the scene. Without
the background plates, the footage looked like pure insanity,
but once were able to add the bunny in there, things looked
much more logical, if still completely frenetic."
After adding the animated pink bunny to the gritty urban
landscape, the Aardman team went about adding realistic
reflections in puddles and adding live action splashes
from their location shoot.
"We're proud of this spot," admits Cook. "The
edit is nice and sharp with lots of energy, and the jump
cutting feeds into what can only be described as the unattractive
aesthetic of the location. We performed all of our CG
work in Autodesk Maya. Everyone is very pleased with the
results."
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CLICK
THE DURACELL BUNNY TO WATCH THE TV COMMERCIAL |
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ABOUT
AARDMAN ANIMATIONS |
Over the last twenty years Nick Park and Aardman Animations
have become synonymous with 3-D stop-motion animation
in the UK, successfully straddling advertising, music
videos, TV series, Internet animations, Academy Award
winning shorts and big budget feature films.
Having already made a couple of unsuccessful attempts
at animation aimed at an older audience in the 1970s,
Aardman found a new outlet with the arrival of Channel
Four in 1982. This led to Conversation Pieces (1983) and
Lip Sync (1989), series which featured animated characters
mouthing words recorded during interviews with members
of the public.
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YOU
CAN WATCH NUMEROUS CLIPS OF AARDMAN ANIMATIONS FILMS
ON YOUTUBE. CLICK THE YOUTUBE LOGO. |
The standout edition turned out to be Nick Park's Creature
Comforts, with its memorable range of animals musing about
their captivity in a zoo, most notably a Brazilian student's
voice used for a jaguar complaining about his accommodation.
The short went on to win many awards, including Aardman's
first Oscar, and inspired the celebrated advertising campaign
for Heat Electric (often misremembered as being for British
Gas). Aardman has subsequently worked on a number of advertisements,
the most distinctive of which are probably the Lurpak
spots featuring a character made of butter named Douglas.
After arriving at Aardman in the mid-'80s, Park first
worked on David Hopkins' anti-war short Babylon (1986)
and also contributed the dancing chicken sequence to the
groundbreaking video that Aardman made to accompany Peter
Gabriel's Sledgehammer (d. Stephen Johnson, 1986). Their
later music videos include Nina Simone's My Baby Just
Cares for Me (d. Peter Lord, 1987) and the Spice Girls'
Viva Forever (d. Steve Box, 1996).
When Park moved to Bristol he made a deal with the NFTS
that they would continue to finance his still unfinished
student film, while Aardman would provide the facilities.
Thus he was able to complete A Grand Day Out (1991), the
first Wallace and Gromit adventure and Park's first film
to be shot on 35mm.
In it Wallace, the enthusiastic Lancastrian inventor (based
on Park's father), and Gromit, his faithful and forbearing
canine sidekick, travel to the moon to replenish their
stock of cheese. Later episodes toned down the whimsy
and fantasy elements, but the love of improbable Heath-Robinson
type machines, gentle wit, unforced jollity and charm
which would later come to be seen as Park trademarks,
are already in evidence here.
The film was a great success when shown on the BBC and
the corporation went on to commission two further adventures,
The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), both
going on to win Oscars. These increasingly elaborate productions
have become glossier and more assured with each new edition,
while Park's love of film lore is very much in evidence.
The train climax in The Wrong Trousers may very well be
Park's finest single sequence to date, although the extended
Thunderbirds homage which opens A Close Shave, as well
as its bungee-jumping window cleaning gags and aeroplane
climax come very close.
Following their Oscar-winning successes, Aardman decided
to move into features, making a multi-picture deal with
Hollywood studio DreamWorks. Chicken Run (UK/US, co-dir.
Peter Lord, 2000) is set in Park's usual 1950s-style Britain,
but takes as its template John Sturges' The Great Escape
(1963), substituting a battery farm for the German POW
camp. Voices for the romantic leads were capably provided
by Julie Sawalha and Mel Gibson, though they are upstaged
by a pair of cheerful rodents voiced by Timothy Spall
and Phil Daniels.
The finished film was a resounding critical and commercial
success and Aardman soon announced that its next DreamWorks
project would be Tortoise vs. Hare, a version of the celebrated
fable to be directed by Aardman mainstay Richard Goleszowski.
In the summer of 2001, after eighteen months in pre-production,
the decision was made to postpone it, citing script problems
and an over-accelerated pre-production schedule. Instead,
Park and Aardman decided to bring their most famous characters
to the big screen in Wallace and Gromit and the Curse
of the Were-Rabbit, a horror pastiche that Park is co-directing
with Steve Box.
Park was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours
List in 1997.
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