When American Airlines embarked on its symbolic 2013 rebrand, it faced a difficult challenge; show off a newly-branded fleet livery and in-flight experience that didn't exist yet to the world's media.
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.
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), so they needed a solution.
Fortunately we had one; put the fleet 'into service' virtually.
"The new design only existed more or less on paper"
Virtual film-making
Our solution 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 and video, everything – airport, ground crews and vehicles, runways, landscapes, clouds, aircraft – would be created in photorealistic 3D CGI.
To compliment the films, and to show off American's new in-flight product experience, we also created interactive cabin tours, again rendered in photorealistic 3D.
Streamlining
In order to create precise digital replica aircraft, we went to Boeing and obtained (with special permission) the CAD data of their 777-300ER.
The 777 is absolutely enormous, and in turn designing one creates incredible amounts of data as everything down to individual nuts, bolts, and rivets are modelled with mathematical precision.
To handle with all of this data, which would increase substantially 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.
Digital dirt
We worked with the American brand and marketing team to craft the narrative and decide how best to show off the new aircraft livery, and which backdrops they wanted.
Meanwhile the rest of the team were busy sorting through the engineering datasets from Boeing, removing anything we didn't need or wouldn't be seen through the virtual camera view in any of the scenes.
One of the challenges of CGI is achieving a convincingly realistic look – striking a balance between making the aircraft livery look new, but not too shiny and clean that is looked unrealistic.
Also, no matter how new something is, it's rarely without some little dint, scratch, or dust/dirt accumulation in nooks and crevices. So we came up with a technique to control precisely the amount of digital dirt and wear in order to make it look realistic.
For the exterior shots, we used a dedicated terrain software to handle generation of digital landscape, mountains, lakes, valleys - anything scenic that would create a dynamic feel to the films.
Digital assets
The advantage of creating things digitally is that the assets you make are essentially infinitely reusable.
Had we shot the livery in live-action, then we'd have been stuck with 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.
On the other hand 3D assets are essentially infinitely reusable - their appearance, scale, surroundings, movement etc - all can be tailored to suit any application at a fraction of the cost.
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 followed this up with an interactive gesture-based flight simulator in partnership with Disney/Pixar, stationed at selected airports around the world.
The results of our partnership have been rewarding; the most successfully livery launch in American's history, a huge increase in key segment sales, best in class awards, and animated immortality in a Disney/Pixar movie – further elevating awareness of the new brand.
