About

This is literally why we got into this game in the first place!

Projects like this collaboration between global cruise brand Royal Caribbean and Australian street artist Handbrake are what we live for and this one was a hell of a lot of fun.

Royal Caribbean is one of the biggest cruise companies in the world, operating on every ocean with ships that are literal floating cities. They can accommodate thousands of travellers and they offer on-board activities like indoor skydiving, laser tag, ice skating, rock climbing, casinos, onboard surfing, water slides, and even puppy dogs to play with! Seeing it all up close and personal was a mind bending experience.

Full disclosure – the street artist known as “Handbrake” is from Perth, and it also happens to be our Creative Director here at Birdhouse, Hans Bruechle. Yes, he does a lot of different creative things. Royal Caribbean commissioned Hans (Handbrake) to come up with a design to be live-painted onto a mural in Brisbane for a massive cruise industry event, and of course they wanted our crew to follow the action and film it all!

Our Task

The collaboration between RC and HB took place in Brisbane QLD, so our crew packed our bags and accompanied Hans over east for a week leading up to the event.

Royal Caribbean rented an art studio, built a mural wall, and Hans spent the three days prior to the event prepping his design and making sure it could be finished in front of a crowd.

The Birdhouse team spent every day with Hans, covering the entire painting process from buying the paints, to the early stages of painting on the mural wall, to the final stages finishing the work in front of hundreds of event attendees. We treated it like a documentary – filming interviews with the artist and several key members of Royal Caribbean.

We literally camped out inside the studio with Hans as he got to work splashing paint around, and it was fantastic to see his work process from beginning to end. 

Not only did Royal Caribbean want us to capture the painting, but they also sent us on a cruise to the Whitsunday Islands as a research trip!!

Yep, we got to see what all of the hype was about, and Hans got to experience cruising to gather inspiration for his artwork. How often does that happen??

It was an exceptional week of filming and fun and was a deeply creative process in all respects.

The Result

The final collection of content is a suite of colourful and vibey documentary-style videos that shows the larger-than-life nature of the Royal Caribbean brand. Handbrake is also promoted heavily as the creative driver behind the story and you can tell he had a blast working on this project!

The crowd at the cruise 360 event were in awe of the final painting, and the RC team were so happy to have both Hans and Birdhouse along for the ride. 

We edited a full length Hero edit, as well as a series of social media clips that Royal Caribbean used to completely dominate the competition during, and after, the event. RC got so much more attention than any other cruise brand it wasn’t even close!

This was, hands down, one of our favourite projects of the year and we cannot wait to work with Royal Caribbean again.

We love creating fun doco-style content like this, and if you’d like to work with us we’d love to hear from you. Click the button below to get in touch and let’s talk today!