Brief Explanation

The film starts as brave chicken turns on a tape deck with a single peck, a cover “Wind Beneath Your Wings” by Bette Midler begins to play. More than a ballad, the song speaks to the strength and power of belief in driving people towards what they never thought possible, and as our chicken hesitantly begins to beat its wings, the tune is picked up with a growing cacophony of squawking through the barn. Whether lifted by support or sheer determination, our chicken flies towards an open barn window, pausing only once as it sees a Tigerair airplane fly past. With its daily ritual complete, a single tear rolls down its feathered cheek and the camera flies past the chicken to the blue sky beyond. Tigerair Infrequent Flyers Club. Don’t fly much? Join the club.

Creative Execution

Tigerair ‘Infrequent Flyers Club’ required a large number of subtle and invisible visual effects to pull off the magic inherent in the original script. Chickens don't like to stay still or do what they're told. Because of this, we could only shoot a single chicken at a time. We shot each chicken independently, capturing the 2 second moments when they were staying on their marks and facing the right way, and stitched the shots together for all the takes where multiple chickens are on screen. To complete the shot, the VFX team had to stitch 16 shots together for each and every wide shot, and find the perfect moment where the chicken was behaving and the handlers were out of shot. There was a great deal of shadow interaction to fix, chickens intersecting each other to roto, time ramping certain elements and synchronizing it all with our hero chicken. Throughout the commercial, we wanted to create a feeling of life, even in the shots where very little was going on. One of the jobs in VFX is to create depth to a shot that no one will notice, but everyone will miss if you leave it out. In this instance, we added floating dust motes to every shot to bring life to the atmosphere. The process was to create particle systems in a 3D environment. We tracked the movement of the live action camera and recreated the movement on the computer. As the camera moved, the dust motes moved past our lens just as they would in real life. We also matched the physical camera’s lens quality to create depth of focus in the particles. This is key to creating the commercial’s warm, naturalistic aesthetic and helping to create the heartwarming moments of the film. Each particle was made up of individual shapes. We modeled pieces of fluff, specks of dirt and a whole range of other things found floating in the air. Without this detail, the specks would have just looked like balls of sand floating about. Next up, the tape player. Although, the tape deck we used was a beautiful item, it was a little past its prime and wouldn’t turn on. When our hero chicken pressed play, nothing happened so we needed to create the illusion of the tape spindles turning. Super subtle, but incredibly necessary. The highlights glinting off the metal and plastic elements had to be created in 3D and then composited into the final shot in a very careful way. We tested variations of ‘obviousness’ and needed to keep it very subtle for the sake of reality. Any shot of the window required sky replacement. In the original plates, there were trees and a power line in the way. To expose for the inside, the sky was also completely blown out. We had to replace it with a realistic sky fit for the Tigerair plane to fly through. Singing Chickens: we wanted to be careful not to anthropomorphize the chickens by articulating their mouths in an unnatural way, so we needed to work on their beaks and jowls as separate solid and flexible objects. We separated the elements and did beak replacements on the solid parts, while flexing and distorting the jowls in time. And we also had to paint in a background plate for anything you could now see ‘behind’ the new beak, frame-by-frame. Flying Chicken: We used Green screen to isolate the chicken, a green pole to lift it and wing flapping plate shots. All these elements had to be combined to create the hero chicken’s hopeful flight. Then 3D particles, CG volume light and a good amount of warping necks and heads to face in the right direction had to occur, to help it feel realistic. Chickens look down at the ground most of the time. All the chickens who are watching the flight were looking down in the live action plates. We had to cut out each chicken, distort them to look up and then reanimate them to appear interested in the flight of their esteemed hero! The aircraft was created in 3D, with the aircraft texture projected onto a 3D object, which gave us the ability to fly it past the window and get a sense of perspective in the wings, which can’t be achieved in 2D. In all the aircraft shots, we completely recreated the sky, the window frame, glass and grime on the window surface. The tear is a lovely moment in the commercial and was executed in 3D. The chicken’s eye was tracked in 3D and a 3D model of a tear was created to roll down the bird’s cheek and ripple over the contours of the lower eye folds. Once again, the subtleties in this effect is key. A tear is invisible except for the highlights it creates with the light in the room. To make our hero chicken fly, there was a combination of various plates, green screen, 3D dust, ‘puppeteering’ the chicken’s head and time ramping, to achieve the perfectly timed look up and out to the aircraft. The ‘wobbly’ movement was created entirely in 3D using a camera track we filmed in the studio. We took a digital camera, filmed a camera move we were happy with and then tracked that into the shot. Once that was in the scene, we had to offset all the elements (the foreground chicken, the background plate and the dust motes to all move relative to their places in the space. As with all visual effects, the goal is for them to be integrated into the world and be invisible to the naked eye. This commercial has lots of work and all of it is very subtle. Without them though, the world simply would have been lifeless, and missing the emotional story of the chicken’s yearning flight, and its singing friends’ encouragement.