Finnair Wild Horses
December 11th, 2008

Art Director Juhamatti Murtomäki contacted us with an idea for a campaign for Finnair. The picture was going to be a bit of a new angle to Finnair advertising which has held it's strong illustration-like appearance for several years. The picture was going to have a bunch of cloud horses making a bit of a hassle. Finnair doesn't get tangled up though since they know a better route.

Tuomas Korpi started by sketching a mood painting that presented our idea for the overall look and feel of lighting and colour. The client liked the painting a lot and decided they wanted to preserve some of the brushy characteristics in the final picture too. "At this stage I wasn't happy with the horses at all.", says Tuomas. "Even though the lighting and colours were appealing, the horses lacked proper kick and dynamics."

Mood sketch

We searched for proper reference of strong raging horses and came up with some rodeo pictures. "We really wanted live and brisk horses instead of some stiff rider statues.", says Mikko Vormala. Mikko drew a sketch of the herd of horses to be used as a basis for the 3D-modeling.

Incidentally, Jani Karvonen had some time ago built a detailed model of a horse as a personal project. It was far more accurate than we actually needed for this project, but at least we had really good tools to work with. Jani arranged the horses according to the pose sketch and handed them over to Turkka Kylliäinen, who in his turn rendered the horses as clouds. "We only needed a certain level of 3D-accuracy with the horses.", says Turkka. "The real work was going to be in the painting and retouch, but the rendered horses gave the best foundation to start building upon as far as shapes and lighting go."

Tuomas then tested the retouch process with a single horse combining it with photographic clouds and painted material. He continued expanding the mass of clouds by first roughly painting and then searching for suitable stock clouds. "It was a lot of mix and match, trial and error finding the right track.", says Tuomas. "I ended up simplifying the rendered and photographed look quite a bit to get the desired painted look right."

Credits

Client: Finnair

Agency: SEK & Grey
Creatives: Juhamatti Murtomäki, Mikko Kaivo-Oja
Account Director: Lauri Toivonen
Account Executive: Tarja Koskela