The New Virgin Atlantic Safety Video: A Nod To Classic Movie Culture

And the new "creative" airline safety videos continue to drop, with surprising regularity now.

Air New Zealand has been a pioneer of course, and Virgin America has followed its brand of high energy videos. So much so that at some point the message of these videos are completely lost, and the game then purely becomes how viral can the video go.

Case in point: the new Virgin Atlantic safety video, at almost 6 minutes long one of the longest videos in the genre. At first glance, cleverly done in the self-aware nod as is in vogue in our culture right now, the new video is an animated one that sweeps through a history of different movie genres, and classics such as Brief Encounter and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Created by Art & Graft, the voiceover is by British comedienne Morgana Robinson, with a range of different accents/impressions.

This is the first new safety video for Virgin Atlantic after its first one 12 years ago.

From the company behind this video, a description of the creative process behind this new video, which we think is more interesting than the video itself.

Inspired by classic cinema, cult films and mirroring the usual apathy toward safety messages; the six-minute animation travels through a surprising and playful series of genre-based film scenes to convey all the necessary information.

To bring our ideas to life, the A&G team combined an illustrative approach with exciting 3D and 2D animation techniques. All the character animation was produced using a traditional frame-by-frame technique – very labour intensive, especially when creating a 6 minute film, but the results look beautiful and are extremely rewarding!

Elements throughout the film were modelled in 3D; allowing us to ’wrap’ our illustrations around these models to keep the illustrative feel yet giving the scenes fantastic depth and space. This allowed all the camera angles to be planned out and ensure the 2D characters could then be animated in each scene with the addition of further textures and casted shadows.

Credits

Creative Directors: Clement Bolla & Mike Moloney

Producer: Dom Thompson-Talbot

Executive Producer: Mike Moloney

2D Animation: Stephen Middleton, Stephen Vuillemin, Jim Wheeler, Joe Sparkes

3D Animation: Michaeljohn Day

Compositing: Clement Bolla, Abel Kohen

Music & Sound Design: Brains & Hunch

Voice-Over: Morgana Robinson, Ben Roberts

For Virgin Atlantic:

Producer: Leon Trigg

Safety Supervisors: Mary Gooding & Jonathan Jasper