Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Bear Grylls Hunts Moa in NZ

Hot on the heels of last November's very clever Hobbit in-flight safety message, Air New Zealand rolls out its latest video.
The new video, Bear Essentials of Safety, captures survival expert Bear Grylls - famed British adventurer and host of Man vs. Wild - delivering important safety messages while tracking the extinct moa in the wilds of NZ.
It took three days to film the four-and-a-half-minute video along the Routeburn Track, a 32km trail on the southern tip of the South Island. Yeup, no actual shots of a plane interior - instead, plane seats and passengers at various stunning outdoor locations.
The video features Grylls being...well...Grylls, stowing a fish in an overhead locker (a moss-covered hole in a rock), eating the exit path lighting (glow worms) and oxygen masks falling from a tree, which Grylls describes as a could-be 'portable loo.' The video builds perfectly off the back of the strong imagery generated globally by The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.
If you're not a kiwi (er, a New Zealander), then the video references to the extinct moa bird may be lost on you. But suffice to say, it's a now-extinct flightless bird the size of a bloody giant ostrich! The video also has a cast of native NZ creatures including a kea (moutain parrot), a tuatara (lizard), glow worms, a moa and also features NZ entomologist Ruud Kleinpaste, known as the Bug Man.
Air NZ's in-flight videos are the envy of the global industry. Previous videos have featured the All Blacks rugby team and US rap artist Snoop Dogg. The video that attracted the most attention was a 2009 creation, entitled Bare Essentials, showing cabin crew dressed only in body paint made to resemble their normal uniforms!

No comments: