Burberry Kisses explores the universal theme of love through the kiss—one of the most iconic and personal symbols of human emotion. Part of Google’s Art, Copy & Code project, the campaign invites users to capture their actual kiss with a webcam or their mobile device, then send it to a loved one anywhere in the world. Each kiss travels through a Burberry-inspired, WebGL journey before arriving at its destination, then joining others in a visualization of kisses sent around the world. In just the first 10 days, kisses were sent from over 13,000 unique cities, traveling more than 109 million miles. 

For my role in the project, I participated in the brainstorming sessions that lead to the final concept. To sell the idea to Burberry, i created a 3d modeled animatic showing the journey which highlighted the use of Google street view and detailed silhouettes depicting major cities. 

The client was excited to see as many cities flushed out in 3d, this was something that had never been done on the web and we realized this was going to be a massive undertaking. As it turned out, the best way to develop fully realized 3d models of cities for WebGL was to model them in Blender and animate them in Unity. While we had a dedicated Unity contractor assembling the cities, my job was to model the buildings quickly and efficiently using as little vertices as possible, then animate the camera and envelope through the scenes. Though I was more comfortable in C4D I quickly adapted to the new environment and was able to identify places where the process could be sped up significantly. 

Even with what felt like a massive shift in scope toward the beginning of the project, we were still able to deliver on time and even carved out some time at the end to push the visuals farther than promised.