Selected Work
Commercial
Passports
Commercial
Air NZ Safety Video
Commercial
Long Term Plans
Commercial
This is Kiwi
Commercial
Te Tāhuhu o te Mātauranga
Commercial
The Horse’s Mouth
Commercial
Air NZ Safety Video
Overview
Air New Zealand’s in-flight safety video is a national institution — a category they pioneered the art of disguising mandatory regulatory beats inside genuine entertainment. With three years off-air post-pandemic, the bar was high. The spot opens with NBA-bound Steven Adams playing pick-up against a couple of kids on a classic Kiwi seaside court; as more players join, the world around him expands — the court grows, the crowd materialises, the venue mutates from beach to high school gym to packed arena — all while the safety beats land seamlessly inside the action. Cameos from Dame Valerie Adams, Tom Sainsbury, Andrew Mulligan, Theo Shakes, and Air NZ flight attendants Teio and Shanti carry the through-line. Our brief was to make the world’s growth feel inevitable rather than overt: every plate became a hub for crowd extensions, set extensions, court morphs, sky and signage replacements, and fully digital arena builds, knitted together so the camera never noticeably cuts on the world’s expansion. Across the full safety video runtime, the work spanned environment design, layout, animation, FX, lighting, and a unified Nuke comp pipeline that kept the look consistent from sunlit beach to floodlit stadium.
Houdini
Maya
Unreal Engine
Nuke
DaVinci ResolveBehind the Scenes
Process & Approach
On-Set Supervision
Our supervisor was embedded with the production from prep through wrap, capturing HDRIs, lens data, witness cameras, clean plates, and tracking reference for every setup. With the world expanding shot-to-shot, every plate had to be slotted back into a sequence that built up around it — lighting and lens metadata were captured to a level that let us seamlessly grow each setup.
Environment Build & Layout
The growing world — court → schoolyard → indoor gym → stadium — was blocked end-to-end in Unreal Engine so the director, cast, and editor could see the build progression in near real time. From there, hero environment assets were finished in Maya and Houdini with a shared lookdev kit, ensuring colour, materials, and crowd populate kept continuity across what is effectively four different worlds inhabited by the same cast.
Crowd & Set Extensions
Each plate received bespoke crowd extensions, set extensions, and digital signage. We built reusable crowd systems that could be re-cast and re-lit per environment, plus a library of architectural extension pieces (bleachers, lighting rigs, banners, scoreboards) so the world could grow believably between cuts without ever feeling templated.
FX & Atmosphere
Atmospheric FX in Houdini — sand particulate, dust kicked up by play, hall haze, stadium smoke, light shafts — sat in front of the live action to ground the cast in each environment. Each FX layer was tied to the practical lighting on the day so the integration disappeared into the photography rather than reading as a layer on top.
Compositing Pipeline
Every shot ran through a unified Nuke comp structure — matched colour science, shared atmospheric LUTs, and consistent light-wrap and edge integration tools — so the look held together from sunlit beach to floodlit arena. Comp worked from 32-bit EXR deliverables, preserving full dynamic range through the grade.
Selected Frames
Film
In Production
