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
Passports
Overview
The launch spot for Air New Zealand’s new brand direction — a father telling his daughter a bedtime story of his life adventures, the camera living inside her wide-eyed imagination as the tale unfolds. The reveal: he’s reading from his passport, and the worlds he describes leap from its pages. Our remit was to make that imagination tangible. We delivered the full VFX scope across every shot: layout and previs in Unreal Engine to lock framing and pacing while the agency and director iterated; a full CG asset and environment build in Maya and Houdini covering destinations, creatures, vehicles, and weather; bespoke FX for water, atmosphere, dust, and light interaction; and a unified Nuke pipeline to seat the digital storytelling cleanly inside the live-action plates of father and daughter. The pieces had to feel handcrafted and warm — picture-book worlds, not VFX showpieces — with photoreal integration that disappeared so the performance could carry the spot. On-set VFX supervision throughout the shoot ensured every plate landed with the lens, lighting, and tracking data the post pipeline needed.
Houdini
Maya
Unreal Engine
Nuke
DaVinci ResolveCG Renders
Process & Approach
The Brief
Air New Zealand wanted to create a sense of wonder around the travel experience itself — not just the destinations, but the anticipation and imagination that a simple passport stamp can unlock. The creative concept centred on the idea that each page of a passport contains an entire world waiting to be explored.
On-Set Supervision
Our VFX supervisor was embedded with the production team from day one, working alongside the director to plan shots that would seamlessly integrate CG environments with live-action. This included precise HDRI captures, lens data logging, witness cameras for matchmoving, and Lidar scanning of key set pieces to ensure our digital environments would lock perfectly into the physical world.
CG Environment Design
Each passport world was designed as a complete miniature environment — from rolling New Zealand hillsides to bustling cityscapes. Our team built detailed 3D assets including vegetation, architecture, vehicles, and atmospheric elements. Textures were created at extreme resolution to support the macro-lens photography style, with every surface telling a story of place and culture.
Compositing & Integration
The final composite required marrying hand-held live-action photography with meticulously rendered CG environments. We developed custom depth-of-field tools to match the macro lens characteristics, built interactive lighting rigs that responded to on-set lighting changes in real-time, and created seamless transitions between the real and digital worlds that made the impossible feel completely natural.
Selected Frames
Film
In Production
