2022 was not an easy year for travel, as anyone who took a flight can attest. Along with an incredible amount of pent-up demand, there were also a lot of nerves and stress about what might happen on a trip.

As Canada’s leading airline, Air Canada was taking the brunt of the criticism about travel chaos, and operating in a deficit of emotional goodwill.

This led to an opportunity during the busy holiday season: Help Air Canada connect with Canadians on an emotional level and increase brand favourability after a chaotic year.

Air Canada, as they have done for the last several years—when holiday travel was an option— decided remind people that the holidays offer a sense of hope and optimism, and an emotionally driven reason to hop on a plane: the chance to reunite with loved ones

The Stopover was a complicated spot, from an animation perspective. Showing mountains, lakes, and clouds, involves a lot of different CGI programs and simulations to bring it to life. We then needed to combine these elements with the characters who were created in yet another software.

More than 30 artists were involved in bringing Santa’s workshop to life: modeling and texturing the workshop, the toys, and the setting itself.

Feathers are always a challenge for CGI, and cannot be completed by multiple artists, so only two artists were involved in this phase, creating the feathers one-by-one.

Finally, we need to animate the birds. They needed to look realistic without losing the charm of classical animation. One of the key decisions was that the loon had to peck things with its beak—open doors, play with the wooden duck—the young loon never uses his wings as hands, to remain authentic.

As the world’s second-largest country, Canadians are already spread out during the best of times, so reminding people of the importance of connection was central to our story. The Stopover also touched upon some universally shared experiences and emotions: isolation and loneliness, but also love, resilience, and determination, to create a story about the power of love.

Not only did we get Canadians to fall in love with Air Canada again, we got them to remember the real reason why we travel: the magic of being together with friends, family, and loved ones..

Compared to benchmarks, our video had:

15.2x more Shares

3.8x more Comments

7.2x more Reactions

A 1.2x higher average View Time.

Increase in brand closeness and consideration.