The Situation:

The travel industry is under pressure from all sides. After years of losses, airlines are suddenly dealing with a massive surge in demand, amongst staffing challenges at every turn. As the country’s largest airline, Air Canada takes much of the criticism. But during the holidays, their role is more emotionally charged. As the ones flying families and loved ones to celebrate together, Air Canada has more opportunity to build goodwill with Canadians.

The Brief:

Remind them of the transformative power of being together, and the magic of travel.

Objectives:

Create an emotionally impactful, brand-building spot to connect with Canadians and get them to feel positively about a brand they love to hate. Specifically:

Above norm tracking of emotional responses (Warm, Stirred my emotions)

Increase Consideration

Increase Closeness scores

Cement position as an iconic Canadian brand

Positive uplift in key customer care metric: Air Canada brings people together.

We built a new pipeline to combine 2D Cel blended with 3D animation techniques.

Every piece seen on screen is a hand painted element that then gets brought into a 3D world. The characters are digitally rigged so they can move, cast shadows, and interact with the environment in an immersive way. Based on storyboards, artists take each scene in the film and craft a 2D painting that is layered and then brought back into 3D software.

The characters are painted in pieces, brought into cel animation software and animated by hand. Once those animations are complete, they are brought back into 3D software and arranged in space so that they can move through and interact with the environment realistically. Finally, compositors bring a level of polish and finish to the frames and direct our attention to tell the story.