BUCK brings a miniature forest to life with new animated campaign for Airbnb
The newest installment in Airbnb’s “Get an Airbnb” campaign, “Surrounded,” was created by the creative studio BUCK. It transforms the familiar presentation of an Airbnb home by replacing the usual empty cyc stage with a rich, fully immersive forest setting.
This new direction brought a complex set of creative and technical challenges that pushed the team’s ingenuity, ultimately enriching the campaign’s visual identity while staying true to its handcrafted aesthetic.
One of the standout creative challenges was designing two distinct interpretations of a forest within the same setting. On one side was a static, in-world painting, a stylized depiction of a forest meant to look like it belonged in the Airbnb miniature universe.
The other was the miniature forest the characters enter, built with hand-painted textures and 3D geometry. The BUCK team had to balance these divergent styles, ensuring both looked cohesive within the same narrative world while fulfilling different storytelling purposes.
On the technical front, the team achieved a major milestone with the development of a procedural foliage system. Creating a dense, living forest that still appeared miniature required a mix of handcrafted detailing and dynamic simulation.
Using Houdini, they generated simplified but realistic leaf clusters based on high-res tree models. These clusters were then animated in Maya to simulate natural growth cycles.
To enhance believability, a secondary layer of organic spline-based motion was added, allowing the foliage to respond gently to virtual wind and movement, creating the illusion of miniature realism without sacrificing the tactile, stop-motion feel that defines the campaign.
Water simulation posed another layer of complexity. Fluid behavior had to appear both natural and scaled-down—an effect that’s notoriously difficult to achieve convincingly. Each simulation was fine-tuned to create the impression of tiny but realistic water flows, adding to the immersive quality of the world.
The character animation, featuring a cast of both human and animal figures, also played a crucial role. Each movement had to reflect the physical limitations of miniature models while still conveying personality and emotion. This required a careful choreography of rigging, animation timing, and surface texture work.
Together, these efforts produced a film that is visually rich and technically sophisticated, yet grounded in the whimsical charm of the miniature world Airbnb and BUCK have been cultivating. “Surrounded” doesn’t just extend the campaign, it elevates it by embracing new challenges and solving them in ways that respect both craft and innovation.
All images courtesy of BUCK
