United's new campaign (Olympics)

[Svengali]

United Commercials

[Patrice]

Hi Svengali,

Maybe you can add the reason why you post this link here. It should be interesting.

[Paul Fierlinger]

What I find interesting is that the older batch of United spots was produced by Fallon, in Minneapolis, and one of the top 5 creative add agencies in the United States. Those spots were sensitively art directed and the animators were chosen by their unique ways of not just drawing and animating but also their individual and vastly varied ways of conceptualizing spots.

Now United Air has switched agencies, with the resulting spots being the ones linked in this thread, and they all have too much conceptualization in common: they are overly sappy and sentimental, in a word, kitsch. They show the heavy hand of the agency's conceptualizer. Whereas the previous agency's art director had a great understanding for the art of animation, this agency merely continued with the assignment without the original art director's sensibilities.

I wonder if United is happy with their new agency. Perhaps it is someone at United with the overdose of kitschy sentimentality and the new agency has to follow that person's direction. But in either case, this is a prime example of what usually happens when you take away one person's good ideas and hand it over to someone else to execute.

This is a story of the birth of more add industry kitsch.

[Svengali]

Maybe you can add the reason why you post this link here. It should be interesting.

Maybe not, but I thought Paul might have something to say.

Sven

[Paul Fierlinger]

Hey, Sven, at least I gave ample time for someone else to be the first responder. Of course the slot for "first positive responder" is still open for anyone.

[slowtiger]

Cartoonbrew today praises the 5 commercials in http://www.cartoonbrew.com/advertising/ ... ommercials and provides links to HiRes versions of each. (I've copied the links as well.)

OK, what do we have here? At first glance it's nice to see a company spending so much money on animation. Each spot is done by a different team. Despite the different animators, each spot is kitschy, as Paul correctly observed. I don't mind kitsch per se, maybe the target audience likes that.

4 of the spots are 1 minute long, quite epic, so I assume they were intended to be shown on screen, not on TV. The visual richness will play nicely on big screens, I'm sure. Cues of "Rhapsody in blue" add some ... hm, what do they add? 1930 classy metropolitan advertising flair?

http://www.bdm.net/videos/united_butterfly.mov Aleksandra Korejwo: the most "drawn" of the five. Looks like chalk but is coloured sand, the least "technical" looking spot and the shortest (30").

http://www.bdm.net/videos/united_moondust.mov Ishu Patel: I've never liked Patel's work. It always reminded me of artwork of esoteric tarot card sets or the like: symbolism without meaning, more elegant than eloquent. What's he saying?

http://www.bdm.net/videos/united_heart.mov Jamie Caliri: a worn-out metaphor, but done in a very nice style. The storyboard has some weak spots, the cuts left me lost several times. The animation seems a bit off balance to me: some movements are too smooth, others much too abrupt. Very fine naturalistic colours, this spot is based in the real world.

http://www.bdm.net/videos/united_twoWorlds.mov SSSR/Gaelle Denis: I like the b/w part, but not the coloured part of this. CGI - why is it that in most CGI ads people are not walking but merely shuffling around? I guess those characters are the ones that don't get the happy pills of which the makers of the colour part did swallow too many.

http://www.bdm.net/videos/united_seaOrchestra.mov The Blackheart Gang: The polished "a pile of sea shells" look again, which makes it very hard to read the movements. What worked nicely for their "The tale of how", a kind of hermetic mini-opera, is completely misplaced here. What deranged mind of an advertising droid thought of "anything you can fly over can be a subject for an airline spot"? To add insult to incompetence, cartoonbrew wrote "they combined hand-drawn textures and photographs into a brilliant and ornate CG package that is bursting at the seams with creativity." Since when is the sheer number of elements put into a shot a measure for creativity? Especially if they aren't arranged in any way? Busby Berkely would rotate in his grave at the sight of this inaptitude to choreograph.

Pills again: Blackheart Gang produces what can be called "psychedelic art", in this case art which resembles a psylocybin induced view of the world. That's OK with me, I just don't get what this has to do with taking a plane. ("Psychedelic Art" by Robert E.L. Masters and Jean Houston 1968 was a very fine book about inspiration and influence of drugs on art, a standard on this topic. Unfortunately even my hometown library where I read it first doesn't have it any more.)

Overall I'd say there's much "production value" (read: waste of money) for very weak content. In a way this is not far away from the old Len Lye works for the british post office: the connection between artwork and message was completely arbitrary there. But those are classics today. I doubt this buch of CGI madness will be remembered next year. </END OF RANT>

Anybody remembers the old (1950's) Western Airlines TV spots? "The oooonly way to fly!" was the tagline, spoken by a phlegmatic bird lingering comfortably in his seat. Highly stylized, reduced-to-the-max graphics. I only found one later, coloured example here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfmRKHtzfFs, and a bit information about the bird here: http://www.tvacres.com/birds_canary_wally.htm, but I have a bunch of the old b/w spots on a worn-out VHS. That's what I call good advertising with animation.

[Sierra Rose]

That was a very interesting excursion into airline ads, thanks.

I enjoyed the swirled look in "Butterfly". Trying to imagine how that is done.

I'm with you on the "Moon Dust" one...just eye candy...nice, but no message.

I thought the "Heart" one got its story across well, and I enjoyed the drawing.

The "Two Worlds" and the "Sea Orchestra" were color jumbles my mind didn't want to sort out.

I thought your points about them all were astute. Thanks again.

PS: The "only way to fly" bird was ever in our lives of course, and that phrase worked its way into many conversations.

[Mandalaholic]

I thought the sea orchestra clip had some interesting art, yet there seemed to be something really missing about the editing. The flow of the visuals and their sync with the meter and mood of the music seems to have fallen flat.

[Paul Fierlinger]

I just got this e-mail:



Bob Barrie here.
We worked together quite awhile back on your United Airlines spot.
A friend sent me your "TV Paint" blog entry and I wanted to correct a misconception you seem to have.

Stuart D'Rozario and I created and oversaw the original United animated campaign at Fallon from the outset, and we continue to create the United animated campaign here at Barrie D'Rozario Murphy.

I'm sorry you that you found our new commercials so offensive. Thankfully, most others disagree.

I hope you are well, and I continue to admire your work.
Sincerely,

Bob Barrie

[Mandalaholic]

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