VCCP Creatives on Flying High for easyJet

It's Monday. It's miserable. Autumn is on its way. So what better way to banish the blues than booking a budget break? Right on cue easyJet has released its new campaign, Why Not?, an enjoyable extravaganza of escapism.    

shots caught up with the creatives behind the campaign, VCCP's Jonny Parker [below, left] and Chris Birch, to discuss the weird and wonderful world portrayed in the spot.

The ad is quite off-the-wall in tone, especially for a budget airline – what was the brief from the client and what were your sources of inspiration? 

The brief from the client was for us to demonstrate just how easy easyJet have made travel. Effortless, even.  

We were talking about how crazy it is that easyJet have made it possible to fly to European destinations and back for 60 quid. 60 quid! For less than the price of a good steak you can go to a two-day trumpet festival in Budapest or pop to Rome for just your dinner. That’s pretty awesome. And it got us thinking of the myriad of fun you can have with easyJet. You can go away every weekend, to weird and wonderful European worlds. It’s cheap and easy enough to make people spontaneous, adventurous. It makes people throw caution to the wind. We wanted to do a bold commercial that celebrated that fact. Why not? seemed to sum up generation easyJet’s spirit. 

Had you worked with CANADA before? They have a very distinctive aesthetic, what made them the right directors for the job? 

We’ve never worked with them before but we’ve always been big fans of their music videos. Their look is very modern, vibrant, and colourful, and uses a mixture of media - all qualities we wanted in the film. And with the project being pan-European and therefore having no dialogue, the pop promo feel was what we wanted. 

Where did the shoot take place and how long did the process take from start to finish?

CANADA are based in Barcelona and tend to always use the same set designers and production team. Maybe that’s how they achieve their distinct look. So we went to Barcelona for a week. Filming was four days and we had the campaign idea at Christmas - so all in it took eight months.  

What were the main challenges you encountered?

The main challenge was fitting as many weird and wonderful experiences in as possible, without them turning into a massive mush of nonsense: men made of flowers, giant beach balls, wintry portals made of golden glitter. We had to kill off a number of ideas: miniature men throwing parasols as javelins, orange bulls and more just because, sadly, they wouldn’t fit. CANADA are masters of the quick, simple transition so that helped. We didn’t want anything ‘clever’ in the transitions either so that helped too. But yes, the main challenge from our point of view was deciding which fun experiences to cull. 

How much of the spot was shot in camera vs. achieved through post?

Mainly in camera. As a general rule anything that’s ginormous in the ad is probably not real, apart form the hangar - that was totally real and massive and very dark. Roughly 40 per cent of the film is made up of CG and VFX work, and The Mill spent over 1,000 hours creating the CG (easyJet plane, giant beach ball, giant typewriter etc.)

Can you tell us a bit more about the immersive theatre element of the campaign?

Later this month, we’re giving people the chance to put their Why Not? money where their mouth is by bringing a European city to the heart of London in an immersive experience. More details to come, but we wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.