Universal Orlando Resort

A WESOME THRILLS | Universal wanted to create a memorable, multi-media campaign that portrays the lengths the theme park goes to in order to create a vacation destination with such unique thrills. After their in-house creative team at Popcorn created a TV commercial concept called “Awesome Thrills”, PaintBox Labs was commissioned to help bring the storyboards to life by first designing a family of fictional lifelike test subjects we called the Thrill Immersion Models or TIMs for short.

We worked with our partners at Pixeldust Studios to develop several unique design options for the testing models.  One of our most important design tasks was to be able to differentiate from the 80’s crash test dummy characters so we could avoid any legal conflicts with IP, yet still retain that recognition as a testing dummy.

The design team was cognizant of avoiding all the key features of the 80’s dummies that would trigger IP conflicts, such as head shape, black eye holes, mouths, as well as texture, color, hazard markings, and costume design.

WE DON’T DO ORDINARY THRILLS

Our next approach involved the design of a Thrill Immersion Test Lab that would allow our TIMs to be subjected to a variety of attractions and attraction-simulations to ensure that every experience at Universal Orlando Resort is completely thrill-worthy and absolutely awesome. Under the supervision of lead tester Alex, the TIMs scream and laugh their way through every experience proving that we don’t do ordinary thrills.

PUTTING OUR THRILLS TO THE TEST

Universal uniquely reinforced immersive experiences with messaging throughout the production, we worked with the Director and VFX Supervisor to capture the real facial expressions of our talent on the shoot days. This process allowed us to increase accuracy and realism when adding CGI with the TIMs to show that the human experiences at Universal Orlando Resort is a thrill-on-top-of-a-thrill waiting to happen.

In addition to producing the TV commercial, we also captured photography around Alex and the TIMs that could be utilized to create a series of digital marketing and social media executions to spread the campaign over a variety of media.

THE BEST DAY IN L.A.

PaintBox Labs had the honor of working with Universal’s in-house creative group (Popcorn LA) to create messaging that blended the thrilling, action-oriented offerings of Orlando with the more relaxed offerings of Hollywood in one cohesive campaign focused on the unique experiences available only at Universal.

As with Universal Orlando Resort’s campaign, we brought on an award-winning photographer to help capture images and other digital assets around the TIMs to expand the campaign beyond the initial video.