A new global brand campaign created by Fallon Minneapolis for United Airlines artfully illustrates—through the use of animation—how an airline can help improve business travelers’ lives. "United is a great brand. It has a stature to it, and we wanted a unique look and feel that also elevated the brand," remarked Fallon group creative director Stuart D’Rozario. "That’s why we hit on illustration and animation."
The new United Airlines campaign comprises illustrated print ads—some of which feature work originally created for The New Yorker by such noted illustrators as Carter Goodrich, Rea Irvin and Charles Martin—and animated television spots crafted by the likes of Oscar winners Michael Dudok De Wit and Aleksander Petrov (Dudok De Wit and Petrov’s respective spots have yet to break), as well as two-time Academy Award nominee Joanna Quinn. SHOOT has chosen the charming "Interview," a :60 directed by Academy Award-nominated animators Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis of Acme Filmworks, Los Angeles, as Top Spot of the Week.
"Interview," which is animated in a fast, choppy style, follows a man through the process of a job interview. There is no dialogue. The spot is accompanied by a version of the George Gershwin classic "Rhapsody in Blue" (which has been featured in various incarnations in spots for United Airlines since the 1980s) arranged and produced by Elizabeth Myers and John Trivers of Trivers/Myers Music, Manhattan Beach, Calif.
As "Interview" opens, the main character is pulling up a window shade. It is obviously morning, and he has just awakened. His dog lounges in bed as the man tries on a variety of ties in an effort to achieve the right look. You can tell it is an important day given the amount of consideration he is giving to his wardrobe.
We then see a plane soaring through the sky, followed by a cab pulling up to a big city office building. The man gets into an elevator. When he looks down, he notices that he has on two different color dress shoes—one black, one brown. Flustered by the fashion faux pas, he sits down at a table and is interviewed by a panel of three people. After being grilled by them, we see the man walking down the street. He looks dejected. Clearly, he doesn’t think he is going to get hired.
Then, his cell phone rings. He answers it and jumps into the air jubilantly—it turns out he got the job after all.
Cut to a shot of a United Airlines stewardess walking down the aisle of a plane. She spots the man napping in his seat—a smile on his face—and pulls down the window shade next to him.
"Where you go in life is up to you. There’s an airline that can take you there—United. It’s time to fly," a male voiceover intones in the closing moments of the spot.
A NEW APPROACH
This new campaign marked United Airlines’ first foray into animation, according to Brian DiLorenzo, Fallon’s director of broadcast/North America. Meanwhile, the agency itself was fairly new to the genre. "We hadn’t done a tremendous amount of animation in the past at all here at Fallon," noted DiLorenzo, who said the agency’s production department—including senior producer Kate Talbott and producer Sofia Akinyele-Trokey—were eager to tackle the task. "To us, it was exciting," DiLorenzo remarked. "As a producer, you immediately go, ‘All right, this is something new.’ "
The first step in the process was finding animators. DiLorenzo said the agency sought out talent who could bring a story to life and inject it with warmth.
Fallon ultimately selected Calgary, Alberta-based Tilby and Forbis for "Interview" on the basis of their When the Day Breaks. The film, which tells the story of a pig named Ruby whose life takes an unexpected turn after she witnesses the death of a stranger, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 2000.
At the outset of the United Airlines project, Fallon gave Tilby and Forbis a brief that outlined the story. Based on that outline, the directors were asked to write a more extensive treatment. "They said, ‘Have your way with it,’ " Forbis recalled. "They weren’t rigid at all."
Tilby and Forbis essentially used the premise given to them, adding small touches, including the black and brown shoe bit.
Once the agency signed off on the treatment, the directors got to work just after Christmas, using the techniques they perfected while making When the Day Breaks. First, they shot digital video of actors—actually neighbors and friends—performing the actions seen in the spot. Their neighbor Mike Hessler played the most pivotal role—that of the man going on the job interview.
After the footage was shot, it was imported into iMovie where the best takes were selected. Those takes were then imported into After Effects where shots were weeded down and timed to the animatic. The resulting QuickTimes were transferred into Flash, so that drawings could be made on top of the live action to create the characters. For example, the main character’s features were altered and exaggerated. "For a while, we were worried he looked a little too much like Ben Affleck who has been so overexposed," Tilby said.
The images were then printed out to paper and painted by hand using oil sticks. When asked if the painting could have been done in the computer, Forbis responded, "You can’t replicate that look in the computer. A lot of people think computers can do everything and imitate every aspect of real life, but they have a very difficult time replicating an activity like painting."
When the painting was finished, Tilby and Forbis packaged the artwork and sent it off to Acme Filmworks to be scanned, assembled and colored. "We have cats so let me tell you, there was a lot of cleaning to do," Tilby shared, laughing. It turns out that the directors’ two felines insisted on being on the worktable while Tilby and Forbis toiled. "Cat hairs and dirt are quite easy to get out in the computer," Tilby said, adding, "We would have been a bit more careful otherwise."
SOUND AND VISION
While Tilby and Forbis were laboring over the animation, the musicians at Trivers/Myers were simultaneously figuring out how best to arrange "Rhapsody in Blue." In fact, Trivers/Myers actually got a copy of the animatic Tilby and Forbis fashioned at the start of the job to work from, according to D’Rozario. "We had a bit of a parallel process going on because we didn’t want the pictures to totally determine the music, and we didn’t want the music defining the film," D’Rozario explained. "There had to be a good balance between the two."
The imagery and music work in perfect harmony in "Interview." The track—performed by members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Daniel Lessner on piano—reflects everything from the man’s enthusiasm to the tension he feels to his sadness to the release he experiences when he wins the job.
While the finished spot is remarkable, one has to wonder if United Airlines needed some handholding throughout the process, given that this was the client’s first stab at animation. "Rather than us having to talk them into things, they were pushing us to make sure we kept it artful, beautiful and impressionistic," D’Rozario said. "We had the best client in the world on this. They pushed us to make it better and better."
