TCS- Cadbury Sheep

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.

This mischievous sheep was the second "Happiness" animal in the new Cadbury campaign. He appears in an office, urging his human counterpart to partake of a Cadbury's Dairy Milk Chocolate bar. After some whining and nudging, the human gives in, and the sheep takes his cue to have some fun...by head-butting his buddy's chair clear across the office.!

TCS designed and created an animatronic sheep with radio-controlled, multiple-axis eye, brow, blink, nose, jaw, ear, and lip mechanisms. External rods controlled all four hooves, while a special track was rigged, then eliminated in post, to enable the sheep to push and zoom his way down the office hall. As with our puma, the face, neck, and extremities were sculpted in clay, molded in Ultracal, and cast in foam latex. As the trunk is less detailed, those forms were built using foam construction techniques.All surfaces were finished, of course, with a delicate combination of hand application, fur transfer, punching, and electrostatic fiber flocking.

Sheep don't normally sit upright, so Rick and crew had to take some artistic license with the anatomy, enabling the lower hooves to hit the floor, while the upper legs were given a shoulder/elbow/wrist range of movement you might find in a "Happiness"-accompanied human!

Click on the pic above to see the ad! (384x216 1.7 MB)

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