Image Credit: BUCK
At SIGGRAPH 2023, we witnessed the mesmerizing work from the BUCK design team, who took a 2D graphic promoting Airbnb’s new AirCover product and introduced it to the market in a breathtaking immersive experience. Hit rewind and grab your notebook as we travel back to 2023 and chat with the contributors behind “Airbnb AirCover.”
SIGGRAPH: When originally tasked with this opportunity to create this short film, what was the brainstorming process like? How did you get to a point where you were able to bring this idea to life?
Joe Mullen (JM): The brief was to go from the graphic AirCover to a vibrant immersive environment showcasing the Airbnb stays, covered by the AirCover protection program that covers guests during their booking experience and stays.
The challenge was how to seamlessly transition from a purely graphic 2D logo to an immersive, fully detailed environment. We had an initial storyboard and ideation phase where we tried a few different approaches, some that were more editorial with cuts, and others that were more narrative, starting in the world.
Because AirCover was a brand-new product with almost no brand awareness, it was important to begin with a clean and bold title introducing the product. We tried a lot of versions where we created the logo out of the environment, but ultimately landed on starting with a clean graphic logo and transitioning somehow to the miniature world.
SIGGRAPH: Can you speak to the design choice to design and build this architectural dreamland by hand?
JM: We wanted the houses to represent real places that you can stay. Each house you see in the film is modeled after a real-world Airbnb, modified to conform to the footprint of one of the AirCover logo letters. We wanted to retain as much of the real world as possible, and what better way than to make actual real little houses?
We’d done a few other projects mixing practical sets with CG characters, and it works really well. This was, however, by far the most challenging iteration of that technique — using a single very complex camera move across multiple sets and having to line up perfectly from overhead to the graphic letterforms of the logo. It would have been much easier to have just made the whole thing in CG, but we didn’t want to compromise the tactility and charming imperfections that you get with a practical set build. We also might just be gluttons for punishment.
Each letter-shaped house was constructed by hand at a scale that fits with our camera movement and the largest stop-motion boom crane we could find. The full set ended up being about 30 feet long. House Special, our partners and expert miniature set builders, packed these sets chock full of all kinds of fun little details. The Desert Home, for instance, features a watercolor painting of a golden retriever belonging to the CEO of Airbnb.
SIGGRAPH: Were there any barriers you encountered during this process? Whether that’d be the writing or bringing the story to life in a way that conveyed the message Airbnb was looking for. If so, how did you overcome those challenges?
JM: Starting with the AirCover logo and dropping down from an overhead to reveal that the logo letterforms are made up of Airbnb stays had a conceptual tie-in to the idea of “we’ve got you covered.” Because we were starting with the Aircover logo and doing a seamless transition, it made sense to use the letterforms themselves as the footprint of each house, turning the logo itself into our miniature Airbnb village.
The landscapes needed to reflect the design of each home, but a problem quickly surfaced: The kerning (the space between the letters) of the “AirCover” logo was tight, meaning there was never enough negative space around each house for the viewer to fully enjoy the environment.
To solve this problem, we made two sets — one with a very wide kerning so we could beef up our landscapes and zoom tighter into the details, and another for the opening and closing shots that compressed the homes and their surroundings from a more panoramic perspective that lined up perfectly with the letter spacing of the AirCover logo.
For the wide set, the houses are arranged in a line matching the letterforms in the logo, but in the close-up set, the houses are arranged in an arc around the camera, which meant that the front of each set was narrower than the back — like pizza slices. We did this so the camera wouldn’t have to travel as far between houses, and we’d get less banding and get to see more of the detail of each beautifully built miniature house. The first camera was sweeping down from overhead and the second camera stayed almost in the same place and panned across the fronts of the houses.
Marc Steinberg (MS): Our biggest technical challenge was the task of building these two separate cameras in a way that would allow us to blend them seamlessly together. In reality, there were three camera segments that needed to be stitched. The intro and outro used our logo-accurate set, while the middle segment used the detailed, expanded set. Both sets were built at the same scale (1/35th), but they needed to be laid out in different ways. It was also necessary to build them simultaneously on separate stages, and with different motion control systems. All of this was figured out in previs first, where we built scale-accurate geometry and camera moves that took into account the dimensions of the stage. We planned some duplicated terrain and structures at the stitch points so there would be ample overlap to hide the seams.
While we tried our best to plan for everything, some things had to change as the sets didn’t always line up as perfectly as we had planned. We spent some time in post-production cleaning up and blending the plates so they fit together more naturally. We employed a technique where we re-projected the plates using the match-moved 3D cameras, and then re-rendered the shot using a new camera that was a blend of the two.
To assist in post, we captured bracketed 360 degree photos using a Ricoh Theta camera at key locations around the set. We later merged these to create spherical HDRI files that we used as the starting point for lighting the characters. We also captured hundreds of photographs of the set as well as Lidar scans using an iPhone to assist in creating photogrammetry.
SIGGRAPH: What was your favorite part about working on this project? What creative doors were opened once this project was completed?
JM: The biggest challenge, which was essentially a physics puzzle, was also the thing that was the most satisfyingly fun when it all came together.
We needed to build the set at a scale that would be readable at a distance and that we could pack enough detail into to be charming and fun at a close range, so we settled on a 3-inch real-world height for the characters and built the houses to scale based on that. The average house was about 3 feet wide including the landscape around it, which put us at about 30 feet for the whole set. The highest we could lift the camera above the set on our stage was about 16 feet.
So, we had some very real-world parameters to work with and at the same time had to meet a lot of criteria — fitting the huge set in frame from that distance without using a super wide lens and distorting the letterforms (we cheated the angles of the house roofs to achieve this); getting the house roofs, which were all at different heights and distances to the camera, to line up perfectly with the logo from overhead; and seamlessly stitching together two very different cameras across two different sets to make it feel like one smooth sweeping camera move.
To juggle all those things and get everything just right, we did a very tight pre-visualization (many, many pre-visualizations actually) using real dimensions and the exact camera and lenses we were going to shoot with. We got up to v150 on this! Our lead animator, Alex Ceglia, was a true magician in wrangling that camera move. We then rented the largest stop motion camera boom arm in existence — that could get as high as we needed it to and transferred the exact camera curves from Maya to a wonderfully archaic system running MS-DOS via a floppy disk! This was from the computer that controlled the boom arm, previously owned by ILM.
There were lots of little things that we had to fix in post, but for the most part, we were able to capture everything in camera—may be the most complex stop-motion camera move ever attempted?
SIGGRAPH: What advice do you have for those planning to submit to the SIGGRAPH 2025 Computer Animation Festival?
JM: Keep making work that takes risks because it will inspire others to push boundaries too!
As we reflect on our trip back to SIGGRAPH 2023, it is time to start planning for the future of computer graphics by preparing for SIGGRAPH 2025. Program submissions will be open before you know it. Bookmark the SIGGRAPH 2025 homepage and check back soon.
Joe Mullen is a Group Creative Director at BUCK, a creative company of over 400 makers, dreamers and doers that has a philosophy that centers on collaboration. For the past 16 years, BUCK has worked with brands big and small from all over the world to make inspiring work in all mediums and various screens.
Mullen loves pushing the boundaries of visual storytelling in any medium and form, but his specialty is animated commercials. He says he’s still figuring out ways to break the rules and tell engaging stories while reinventing the medium. His current clients include Apple, Amazon, HBO, Airbnb, Google, and Facebook.
Mullen has been at BUCK nearly since the company’s 2004 inception. After studying Graphic Design and Animation and graduating from Calarts in 2006, he was hired as a design intern at the Los Angeles office. Since that time, he’s worked his way up the ladder, serving as Art Director and Creative Director before his current position of GCD.
During the last decade and a half, he’s had the good fortune of working alongside several like-minded artists and creators on many of the iconic, genre-defining and award-winning design projects BUCK is known for. These include Good Books’ Metamorphosis, the NSPCC’s ChildLine: First Step initiative, the British Gas Hive, Facebook Factory, Clif Bar Family Foundation’s Seed Matters, Tinder’s Invention of Together, and most recently, Share your Gifts, Apple’s animated holiday campaign. Mullen has won industry accolades for many of these films, which have also been influential in shaping industry standards and practices.
Marc Steinberg is a self-taught visual effects artist, 3D generalist, and motion designer with 15 years of experience in the film and animation industry. After graduating from UCLA in 2008, he began his career as an assistant editor for music videos and later advanced to roles as a colorist and finishing artist. Following several years of freelancing, Marc co-founded a post-production studio specializing in color, finishing, and visual effects. In 2016 he transitioned to the animation and design industry, joining BUCK as a visual effects supervisor and eventually moving into a 3D leadership role.
