Hopping into Christmas
We brought the Energizer Bunny to the North Pole! We were challenged to continue the ‘Hops into Culture’ campaign for the holidays and there was no better place to hop into. We dressed him in a new outfit and found out he has some insane juggling skills. He can even give the reindeer a power boost.
This was the biggest animation project I’ve worked on to date and I’m proud of this marathon: we put it through many rounds of testing and continuously wrote and rewrote how this came to life. And then we animated and re-animated the previs, constantly optimizing. This project was a testament to a sign that hangs over a door in Camp+King that says, “You’ll think of something.” Creativity is truly unlimited and Joey and I had versions and alts for every frame of this spot.
It was incredible inspiring to get to work with such an iconic character, and it was amazing to see the amount of work from so many teams that it took to complete this.
I’m also proud of where we took the set—a heartwarming dose of nostalgia without straying too far from present day.
Huge credit to a gigantic team: Joey McRobert ACD, Jesse Dillow ECD, Garrett Delorm Head of Producer, Charlie Ferraye Senior Producer, Emily Dillow Head of Brand, William Mcgregor Director, Sam Heasman DP, Color by Paul Yacono, edited by Jessica Ledoux, Animation team led by Monique Espinoza, Audio by Joaby Deal, and emotional support from my chihuahua during the 15 months from creative dev to ship.
On social
On this project, we of course later developed social videos. My role was to Creative Direct another team (Emmett Moore & Aisha Campbell!)
As they brought concepts for social videos styles like a GRWM to wrap gifts, we had to reality check our production budget. We had at our disposal very specific pre-existing Bunny assets to work with, and another shoot or animation was not possible.
BUT, I realized that a lot of the concepts really only needed… Bunny Hands.
To help the team sell their idea, I got some pink fur and sewed Bunny Gloves. We used them to build storyboards and to suggest either incremental budget for a.) human-wearable Energizer Bunny Gloves that so that we could producer more social content & quickly, or b.) time for our animator to rig CG Bunny hands to comp in edit.
It worked! We got funds to both create CG hands, and hire puppeteers to fabricate gloves that match the Energizer Bunny’s fur and anatomy to go over human hands and we made four videos for this holiday campaign.
