It’s all blue skies for the Blue Sky CGI team of Rick Chou, Lee Waters and their band of talented artists. Recently, the award-winning CGI studio was approached by Wunderman, New York to handle a United Airlines direct-mail print campaign.

Blue Sky was asked to create photo-realistic airplane images with retouching included from start to finish. The final imagery had to have the most precise cropping for folded brochures, each to be designated for a specific customer-mileage level: Premier Silver, Premier Gold, Premier Platinum and Premier 1K.

Known throughout leading transportation and industrial companies for their expertise in bringing visual assets to technology, the Blue Sky team did their usual in-depth research to present the most accurate angle study for each airplane layout. Each showed no less than 37 combinations using different lenses and different airplane perspectives.

The team’s skill and artistic creativity started with picking an angle of the airplane to work seamlessly with each layout and then working with key elements as lighting in the CG stage. With stock photos of backgrounds supplied by the agency, light domes were used at the CG stage to bring in the kind of lighting that would not only match but “live" in the image.

The airplanes had to have the look and feel of flying through the air in each scene. The Blue Sky team achieved this photo-realism by carefully studying reflections, direction of light, color temperature and perspective to name a few. Once the planes were rendered, the Blue Sky retouchers dropped them into the backgrounds and then fine-tuned every detail for the final work seen here. Blue Sky did it all in just two months—and even made the time fly by in the process!