Cirkus Makes The World A Smaller Place With Airbnb

Step right up and have a seat center stage as New Zealand animation house Cirkus makes the world a smaller place with Airbnb. Based out of San Francisco, California, Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world. Whether you’re looking for an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month, Airbnb connects people to unique travel experiences, at any price point, in more than 34,000 cities and 190 countries.

The brief for this video was to educate viewers about Airbnb. Who are they? How do they use it, and how can they become part of their community? This all needed to be conveyed by showing how using Airbnb while travelling makes the world a little bit smaller, all while having the opportunity to meet people from all over the world, and live like a local when you visit new places. So in order to check off all of the boxes for Airbnb’s target market, Cirkus wanted the journey to be whimsical, dreamlike, artistic, and fantastic, just like traveling can be.

So curtains up! Grab your popcorn and cotton candy and let’s take a look at how Cirkus made this all possible…

Are you impressed? Well you should be. Let me impress you even more by telling you that no animators were overworked in the making of this video. Seriously, I’m not clowning around! In fact, what you just witnessed did not use any animation at all. No 3D, no wireframes, no keyframing, and no visual effects. Miniature sets were built over a 6 week period in an Auckland, New Zealand warehouse and everything was shot in camera from a model train’s point of view in one long take. Don’t believe me? Then check out the making of, reverse train ride, and time-lapse videos below.