TCS-Cadbury Hyenas

Recently, Cadbury's Chocolate took a bold step forward and introduced a new set of ads to replace their traditional"Flake Girl" campaign. "Your Happiness needs Cadbury" is the tagline, and your "Happiness" is your inner animal, your fauna alter-ego, your "spirit animal", or your "familiar" (if you're a witch!). Cadbury chose red-hot commercial director Noam Murro to helm the first trio of these spots. Murro and his production company Biscuit Films turned to The Character Shop to create the incredibly realistic animatronic animals the series would require.

In the "Hyenas" spot, a a trio of ladies are having a casual party in their friend's English Garden. But the truth is, they can't wait until their hostess pops in to the house for a moment so that they (and their Happiness!) can DEVOUR the Cadbury Snaps.In the end, they are having so much fun that one of the Hyenas ends up playing Charades...up on two legs...with a tea cozy on its head!

Rick and his (huge!) crew had the incredible task of not just creating one lifelike animatronic hyena, but a trio of them. They each had to be able to move from being on all fours, to bounding up on two legs and resting their front paws on a table, and even being able to dance and hop on two legs...and all this is in addition to the normal complex animatronic movements of the ears, eyes, blinks, brows, jaws, nose, and lips! As the hyenas each had a different woman counterpart, each of the hyenas had to have a corresponding "look" and color palette to match their corresponding actresses. Two different types of pivoting booms were built to move the beasts's bodies; one, a static version, and another, rolling version. The booms featured indexable, telescoping arms, so that they could be operated in different spaces and tight spots.

Click the pic above to see the ad! (320 x 240 7.2 MB)

How many puppeteers does it take to make three animatronic hyenas come to life?

Check out the Puma and Sheep we created for Noam Murro and the new Cadbury "Happiness" campaign!