Title	ETIHAD: REIMAGINE
Brand	THE BARBARIAN GROUP
Product/Service	ETIHAD AIRWAYS
Category	E02. Virtual Reality (VR)
Entrant	MEDIAMONKS Hilversum, THE NETHERLANDS
Idea Creation	THE BARBARIAN GROUP New York, USA
Production	MEDIAMONKS Hilversum, THE NETHERLANDS

Name	Company	Position
-	MediaMonks	Production
-	The Barbarian Group, New York	Agency

The Campaign

Take a virtual flight on Etihad’s luxurious A380 in the most high-end VR experience to date. This experience uses VR’s ability to make you feel present in a time and space you couldn’t otherwise be in to guide you through the incomparable interior of Etihad’s flagship fleet. The experience follows Hollywood superstar and Etihad brand ambassador Nicole Kidman on a flight from New York to Abu Dhabi, and showcases the magnificence of Etihad’s A380 by taking you on a cinematic tour of the plane. Showing all levels of service from economy to the unprecedented luxury of The Residence, the creative idea was to set the bar for VR film quality the same way Etihad has done with its service.

Creative Execution

The A380 may be a giant, but working with a full film crew inside the plane was still a challenge. Moving cameras with near-field objects is normally a parallax and stitching nightmare in VR, with ghosting and warping that fuses poorly with Etihad's luxury image. But having done multi-plate, zero-parallax shots beforehand, we drafted a unique world-first solution. Using highly accurate CAD data we were able to virtually visit every corner of the plane months before the actual shoot, allowing us to map out the extremely precise timing and precision that made the shoot possible. We calculated the exact angles and positions of each take. This planning formed a production bible and ensured we had all the pieces necessary to complete this giant puzzle in post production. Furthermore, this level of meticulous planning allowed our film crew that was new to VR to still do their job efficiently, making an otherwise impossible deadline doable. The last scene of the film has the camera sliding along a path inside of a wall, which meant it couldn’t be shot on board the actual plane. Instead, a replica of that part of the plane was built in a sound stage with the missing half added in post production. Even for scenes shot on the plane, large parts are computer-generated to cover up the camera tracks, lights and more. In post production, we treated the terabyte of captured data with exquisite white-glove care and assembled the pieces like a watchmaker, resulting in a complete film without any stitching in the traditional sense; all the pieces slot into one another perfectly thanks to our detailed planning. The audio production was just as ambitious as the visuals, and even resulted in a scientific white paper published by the Audio Engineering Society at their 2016 LA conference.