As any veteran traveler will attest, myriad things can go wrong before your journey even gets off the ground. And even more can go wrong if you foolishly spend too much money on your flight and don’t have enough cash left over to enjoy your trip—as is illustrated by Internet travel provider Hotwire in the animated spot "Paris/ Texas."
Directed by J.J. Sedelmaier of J.J. Sedelmaier Productions, White Plains, N.Y., for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, the spot begins like an in-flight safety presentation: Each scene is animated in the style of the drawings used for in-flight safety cards. In the first, a simply drawn airplane ascends within a boldly outlined square. "Ladies and Gentlemen, may I have your attention, please," announces an unseen flight-attendant-sounding woman. "In the event you pay too much for your ticket …," she continues (the image changes to a pair of hands holding a wallet, while bills fly into the air) "… at a ‘guess your price travel Web site,’ you may find yourself in Paris."
Pictured against blue sky and the Eiffel Tower, a Mom, Dad (carrying a banner with "Paris") and two teenage children break into smiles of delight and let out a loud, "Whoop!" Their faces fall as the narrator adds, "Texas." The camera pulls back to reveal the family standing on a miniature golf course, with the Eiffel Tower just one of the props on the landscape.
The next scene shows us a family of hick country cousins: a sloppily dressed woman, a young boy in overalls and a tattooed man sporting a mullet hair cut. In the background are a trailer, a low-hanging electricity line, and a number of farmyard animals. "You may also be forced to stay with distant relatives …," the voiceover continues. As if emphasizing the appeal of this, an oversized fly buzzes past, the father crushes a beer can on his head, the boy swats the fly against his own head and the mother lets out a loud burp.
Adds the voiceover, "… and you may be subjected to low-end Polynesian luaus." Another family appears—a bewildered-looking father, mother and son. The father, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, puts cocktail umbrellas in two cans simply labeled "beer." They are watching a pizza-eating dancer, whose stomach spills over her green hula skirt, while she unenthusiastically performs a traditional Hawaiian dance. A chef brandishing a large cutting knife runs past, hot on the heels of a getaway pig. "Don’t be overpaying for plane tickets," warns the narrator—as the Hawaiian dancer falls though the decking, an arrow pointing to the spot where she has disappeared. The scene then shifts to the airhostess, who concludes her safety presentation: "Use Hotwire; a great trip starts with a great deal." And the Hotwire logo whooshes onto the screen.
"Paris/Texas" is part of a four-spot campaign. Others ads in the series are "George Johnson," "Larva Land" and "Scream." Goodby, Silverstein & Partners copywriter Steve Payonzeck told SHOOT that at the time of the campaign’s conception, little animation was used in advertising Internet-based companies, so it was decided that animation would be a good way to make this campaign stand out.
"With ‘Paris/Texas’ we were thinking of all the things that could go wrong if you were booking your ticket through another travel Web site, and decided to base the ad on the assumption that you’re basically left with no money because you’ve spent it all getting your ticket," explained Payonzeck. "Then we tried to think of ways that your vacation would suffer. One way was: If you didn’t have enough money to go as far as you would like to, you might end up some place you didn’t intend to go. For example, even though you wanted to go to Paris, France, you only have enough money for, say, Paris, Texas. The other scenarios were illustrations of the things you would have to deal with if you had no money left over: like staying with relatives or friends in some remote location instead of staying in a hotel; and then having to deal with this low-end entertainment that you might be able to afford, rather than something you would like to see."
Because the campaign was the first major promotion for Hotwire, Goodby also wanted to illustrate the travel company’s line of business—something which may not be immediately apparent from the moniker, Hotwire. "It’s not a soft sell at all. We are definitely pushing the product in here," commented Payonzeck
The commercial was created in Sedelmaier’s studio using traditional animation, replicating the flat, simplistic quality of in-flight safety cards. In order to do this, Sedelmaier needed to determine how safety cards were created in the first place. "For the most part, safety cards are not very well drawn or designed. There is this naïve kind of quality to the card, and if you look at it closely, you can tell that the creators use photographs as the foundation and draw over them," he said.
To achieve the required look, the animation started on the same basis—with the crew posing for Polaroids in the scenarios played out in the spot. This provided details on angles and perspective, giving the animators a foundation to work from.
Using the photographs as reference, drawings were made, and once these were approved, the scenes were animated by hand. "It’s kind of like rotoscoping, where you are using live action for reference. But in this case we were not referencing the movement, but the posing—for example, the way the clothes hang or fall on the body. We used a Polaroid because it has a flat lens, and then enlarged the photographs," recounted Sedelmaier. "This was a good way of getting information that was directly related to the technique that we were translating, and really pulled everything together. The animation didn’t look simply like design drawing. There was something static, naïve and dumb about it, that we couldn’t have gotten without those photographs."
The shots of the people posing were modified somewhat: The goal wasn’t to make the characters look like specific people, but to create a generic family. So any time a drawing was too detailed, it was made more innocuous by simplification.
The ink drawings, which are on traditional animation paper, were sent to VirtualMagic Animation, North Hollywood. The firm’s production manager, Chrisie Russell, explained that the technique involved scanning in each of the drawings, creating digital files for coloring, and then compositing the individual drawings.
Colors were muted until the last shot, which displays the bright Hotwire logo. "The ad pops up out of the television screen," observed Sedelmaier, "because most ads are very visually stimulating, and ‘Paris/ Texas’ has a kind of blandness to it that makes it stand out. I saw it on TV for the first time last night, and it did pop," he related.
And although Payonzeck and art director Margaret Johnson conducted several casting sessions to find a suitable narrator, at the clients’ request Johnson herself provided the voiceover for the ad.
The agency team came away with a new-found appreciation for the process and the result. "Animation was a new thing for us. It’s a hard process—long and tedious—and you don’t realize that every little change you want to make is time and money, so it is necessary to edit the spots from the very beginning," Johnson concluded.
