Sony today unveils its latest Bravia TV ad - and it is hoping 200 plasticine bunnies hopping through New York will eclipse its clips featuring bouncing balls and exploding paint.
The TV advert, called "Play-doh", which follows in the footsteps of the mesmerising "Balls" and explosive "Paint" adverts, uses the same technique, "claymation", used in Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit movies.
Sony's ad, which backs the "Colour like no other" tagline of the campaign to push Bravia high-definition LCD TVs, features rabbits ranging from 10cm to 10m in height.
A team of 40 animators spent three weeks choreographing the models to create the 100,000 still images required to produce the 60-second ad.
Other effects included creating a 200 square foot purple plasticine wave and making a whale "swim" through the streets of Manhattan - all while locals went about their daily lives.
"Technically this is the most difficult thing I have ever done," said the ad's director, Frank Budgen. "It is an incredibly difficult situation to control. You have New Yorkers wandering through frames and you have no say over it because we're doing it for real."
The TV ad, created by ad agency Fallon London, officially breaks on TV (Friday) tomorrow night during Ugly Betty. However, the public receive a sneak online preview of the ad and behind-the-scenes footage today on the Sony Bravia ad website.
Releasing footage of the making of the ad is a tried and tested format that came about during the making of the first ad - "Balls" - in San Francisco, when interested locals filmed the agency at work and posted clips on the internet.
The clips, which at first concerned Fallon - TV ad shoots are usually secretive, closed affairs - turned out to be the best PR imaginable.
Fallon and Sony have not as yet managed to capture a Cannes Grand Prix award for one of their ads, despite many observers arguing that they deserved it; agency and client alike will be hoping that it will be third time lucky.
"Having already set the standard high by releasing 250,000 bouncing balls on San Francisco and creating pyrotechnical paint display in Glasgow, we knew we had to be ambitious with the new ad," said Sony's general manager for communications Europe, James Kennedy.
The previous Bravia ad, Paint, released in October last year, required 70,000 litres of paint, 1,700 detonators, 455 mortars, 622 bottle bombs, 65 camera positions and a crew of 200 people to capture a kaleidescope of paint exploding on a disused council block in Glasgow.
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