The year of the rabbit will never be the same after this rampage of impossibly happy triple-threat bunnies created by CD Nicolas Lesaffre and the crew at Nikopicto in Hong Kong for HSBC’s PayMe mobile payment service.

Nicolas Lesaffre: “This whole campaign evolved around our character/IP designs which had to be suitable for animation as well as NFTs, and for real-time applications such as AR/Metaverse. The challenge was to appeal to Hong Kong teens and young adults but also be unique as every brand would be using a bunny for Chinese New Year.

“In total, we created three TV spots, the NFT collection, an AR app, a 150-meter high animated billboard on HSBC’s iconic HQ building, plus a massive outdoor print campaign. A virtual art space to display the NFTs and campaign artworks was also created in parallel.

“Knowing the amount of work required to create these assets under a tight deadline, we chose to incorporate Blender into the pipeline, which was the right choice to get quick previsualization, flexibility with our Unity team, and the ability to test real-time and pre-computed renders at the same time.”

For more of Nikopicto’s CG creature insanity, we highly recommend their 2018 mini-masterpiece Going Ape
 
 

 
Client: HSBC Payme

Agency: Ogilvy/Hogarth Hong Kong

Production: Nikopicto
Creative Director: Nicolas Lesaffre
Producer: Lily Leung
CG lead: Kim Ho
CG artist: Erin Lo, Lung Yeung, Jack Hon, Janice Yu, Rico Lee, Pierre Ducos
Developer: Marco Chan, Johnson Ma

Audio: Click Music