VFX and animation studio Brickyard VFX and General Gau, its in-house arm for custom character-based content, recently completed work on JetBlue Airways‘ “Air on the Side of Humanity” campaign via Mullen. The three-spot campaign engages viewers and conveys the JetBlue experience through pigeons, dubbed ultimate “frequent fliers,” discussing the desire to be treated with some respect and humanity amid the plights of modern air travel. The spots launched this fall in Boston.
Brickyard’s main task was creating entirely CG pigeons for the opening soaring shots in the 60-second “Air on the Side of Humanity” spot and the 30-second “Grounded” spot. General Gau’s Anders Beer filmed hero plates of the pigeons and provided on-set VFX supervision. Then Brickyard and General Gau artists, led by Geoff McAuliffe and Beer, created two digital hero pigeons using Autodesk Maya with V-Ray. The team also composited plates of real pigeons, captured against a greenscreen, throughout these two spots and the third 30-second spot, “Out of the Blue.”
“Offering flexibility was key in this project, in order to successfully illustrate the different stories,” said Brickyard VFX executive producer Kirsten Andersen. “Some shots just required compositing in the real pigeons, some shots required compositing in the real pigeons plus making a subtle change, such as the direction one pigeon’s head was pointing, and then some shots just couldn’t be achieved through live action and required full CG.”
The “Air on the Side of Humanity” campaign marks Brickyard’s latest collaboration with Mullen for JetBlue, a relationship dating back several years, and with Hungry Man director Hank Perlman, who recently tapped Brickyard to develop the first fully CG Chester Cheetah for a nationwide Cheetos campaign.
