Quick question: How do you show off a newly-branded airline fleet livery and in-flight experience if it doesn't even exist yet?
This was the challenge faced by American Airlines in 2013 when, after an extensive rebranding exercise, including replacing its iconic and celebrated Massimo Vignelli logo with a new 'Flight Symbol', they were ready for the big reveal. There was one problem however. The new design only existed more or less on paper.
You see, repainting and re-fitting an entire fleet of aircraft is an expensive and time-consuming process (it would eventually take almost four year for American to finish the task).
Repainting and re-fitting an entire fleet of aircraft is an expensive and time-consuming process
But time waits for no man, and American, having already announced the rebrand the previous year, needed to put something before the press and the public.
To solve this problem they turned to a small, unassuming digital studio located in the quiet village of Cranleigh 8 miles outside Guildford in the Southeast of England.
And I just happened to be the studio's Creative Director.
Our proposal to American was that we could put the fleet 'in-service' before the public in record time. Virtually.
Fresh off the back of some stellar work for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, we were quickly gaining something of a reputation for photorealistic, interactive 3D experiential design, and having seen what we could do, American agreed to our idea.
So if your answer to the question includes 'a whole lot of Photoshop', you wouldn't be far wrong.
The plan was to create a series of short branded films of the new livery on the flagship Boeing 777-300ER. However, in place of traditional aerial photography, everything, and I mean everything - airport, ground crews and vehicles, runways, landscapes, clouds, aircraft - would be created in 3D in the computer, and rendered, composited, retouched, and edited until it was indistinguishable from the real thing.
These would be followed up later with further experiential installations including a 3D holographic system, an interactive gesture-controlled game in collaboration with Disney (who would feature an American character in their up-coming Pixar animated movie Planes), a whole bunch of other co-branded experiences, as well as various exhibition and trade show designs.
To compliment the films, and to show off American's new in-flight product, we also created a number of interactive 3D cabin tours, again rendered in glorious photorealism.
These would be followed up later with further experiential installations including a 3D holographic system, an interactive gesture-controlled game in collaboration with Disney (who would feature an American character in their up-coming Pixar animated movie Planes), a whole bunch of other co-branded experiences, as well as various exhibition and trade show designs.
There are times when you do feel like you've bitten off more that you can chew. This felt like one of those times. Not that we felt intimidated by a big company like American - personally I never get overawed by clients - no, it was more to do with the size of the task in hand and dealing with the incredible complexities of modern airframe, engine, and aircraft interior design.
There are times when you do feel like you've bitten off more that you can chew
In order to create a digital replica that precisely matched the real thing, we went to Boeing and obtained (with special permission) the CAD data of their aircraft.
A plane like the 777-300ER is absolutely enormous, and in turn designing one creates incredible amounts of data as every individual nut, bolt, and rivet is modelled with mathematical precision.
To deal with all of this data, which would grow further as we added the interior design, we radically re-designed our creative pipeline;; upgrading servers and storage, computer systems, software, rendering, play-out and review systems, there wasn't a single part of the studio that didn't get a facelift of some sort to streamline performance.
We used the Max/Maya/SoftImage combo to handle the 3D modelling, animation and simulations of the aircraft, with VRay our preferred rendering engine of choice. SoftImage (now sadly discontinued, but which I'm still a massive fan of) was especially efficient at handling the immense data sets we were throwing at it.
The compositing and editing was performed in Premiere and After Effects, Audition for the music and sound effects, and encoding and compression in Media Encoder.
For the exterior shots, we needed a dedicated program to handle landscape generation of mountains, lakes, valleys - anything scenic that would create a dream-like feel to the usual design. As luck would have it we had John, our resident expert is TerraGen, an awesome piece of custom software that generates exquisitely detailed virtual terrains.
Whilst we worked on a script with the brand and marketing team at American, deciding on the views of the aircraft they wanted to focus on, and the kind of backdrops they wanted, the rest of the team were busy sorting through the 777 datasets removing anything we didn't need or wouldn't be seen in the camera view in any of the shots. We did have to be careful though - there were instances where some elements weren't visible to the camera, but may cast a shadow or reflection that would be, and therefore had to be left in.
On of the particular challenges for the aircraft rendering - to achieve a convincingly realistic look - was striking a balance between making the aircraft livery look new, but not too shiny and clean that is looked unrealistic. The human eye is adept at spotting anything computer-generated, particularly everyday things like people or object since we see the well.. every day. Also, no matter how new something is, it's rarely without some little dint, scratch, or dust/dirt accumulation in nooks and crevices. So for every shot we created a separate 'dirt' layer, where we could control precisely the amount of wear in order to make it look genuine.
If i'm brutally honest I wasn't overly fond of the brand film
Once all the 3D animation, simulation and rendering was completed, we cut a rough edit for approval before doing the final composite, grading and editing fine-tuning, adding the audio and titles, and finishing with a couple of variations of encoding and compression for different play-out options.
Despite the fact it was a resounding success for American, if i'm brutally honest I wasn't overly fond of the brand film.
Every airline seems for follow the same tired formula of plane flying through the sky, close-ups and wide shots of the livery etc. It's all quite tedious and stale. I suppose in the end there really only one way to skin a cat so to speak - you need to show off the livery and kind of put it in situ so that people get a realistic view of what it looks like, We tried to mix it up a bit by staging the ground departure, taxi, and take off - which is a least divergent from the standard script - but to me it's still a little unimaginative. I'd like to have tried something different - perhaps a more docu-style with a real story.
The only thing that really set our work apart was some of the majestic digital vistas we created to put the virtual plane into, and that fact that it was entirely computer-generated - a real feat of digital artistry.
Adaptive design
One of the great things about creating things digitally is that the assets you create are essentially infinitely reusable.
Had we shot the livery in live-action, then we'd have been stuck with either using the same footage over and over in other brand and marketing applications, or having to re-plan and re-shoot new footage from scratch - a rather lengthy and expensive process.
3D assets on the other hand can be used however you wish - their appearance, scale, surroundings, movement etc - all can be tailored to suit any application at a fraction of the cost (this was actually one of the key selling points we stressed to American).
The real jewel though had to be the spectacular ambient graphics we created for the walk-up bar in Business Class.
We created a series of fluid simulations that transformed the liquid splashes
This was a tough one as someone had the bright idea of using slow-motion liquid (to give a more relaxed feeling in an aircraft flying at over 500mph) that morphs into different fruits and even a butterfly.
To pull this off we first started by shooting high speed footage - with a camera rolling at over 1000 frames per second - of ice cubes falling into a tall glass of water on a specially designed sound stage that eliminated any vibration that the camera would have most definitely picked up.
Back at the studio, we manually 'tracked' the resulting (edited and graded) footage so that we could pin point the movement of the water. We then created a series of fluid simulations that transformed the liquid splashes into various shapes.
The most difficult one was the butterfly. Getting the speed, timing, transformation, and subsequent fluid movement of a butterfly made entirely of water, not to mention making it look believable, was a real pain in the backside. But pull it off we did, and now over 30 million passengers annually enjoy the calming and captivating imagery made with the 'fruits' of our labour.
Immersive experiences
Over the course of the next two years (post rebrand), we put those digital assets to further use in a number of stunning, one-off experiential brand and marketing campaigns.
The first was a ground-breaking holographic version of the flagship 777 that once again allowed customers to explore the interior and exterior in an entirely new light.
We created an installation that put the real cabin seats alongside their digital counterparts for a trade show American was exhibiting at.
From the outset we had developed a universal UI grid
And another first for any airline was the in-airport gesture controlled game we created to raise awareness of Americans upcoming inclusion as a character in a Disney/Pixar animated feature film.
We programmed a fully 3D environment for the flying tests, tracking the movement of players which was then mapped to the aircraft to control its pitch, roll, and yaw. The lifted the UI elements from the virtual cabin tours (from the outset we had developed a universal UI grid that could flexible work across applications), with minor amendments for the inclusion of Disney/Pixar co-branding.
The game enabled players to fly the American character through a series of aerial tests, for which points would be accumulated and the top 10 highest scorers added to a leaderboard.
Every player would receive a personalised photo of themselves in the booth, captured in-game by the systems gesture tracking camera, and packaged in a special card with a certificate.
The game proved so popular that passengers and even flight crews (from both American and other airlines) tried their hands at it (with often surprising results amongst the pilots).
Setting standards
All in all, we did an accomplished job on the rebrand and subsequent experiential marketing.
The work we did not only won us more than 5 awards, but more importantly it really set the creative and economic benchmark for what branded content utilising re-usable assets can achieve.
