Giving a small hero a big-screen adventure
Client
Teamto
Country
France
Disciplines
Campaigns
Movie Marketing
Sector
Entertainment
Film Industry
Yellowbird is a 3D animated family adventure produced by French animation studio TeamTO and directed by Christian De Vita. Featuring the voices of Seth Green, Dakota Fanning, Danny Glover and Christine Baranski, the film follows a timid orphaned bird who unexpectedly finds himself leading a flock on its annual migration to Africa, beginning a journey of courage, friendship and self-belief.
The brief
TeamTO asked BakerWilcox to create international key art and supporting campaign materials for Yellowbird. The commission included the main one-sheet, title treatment, cast and credit assets, advertising artwork and a series of alternative poster concepts for use across international sales and release activity.
Final Key Art
How we structured the art
The execution
The key art needed to introduce Yellowbird as the clear heart of the story while conveying the scale, colour and excitement of the flock’s journey. We placed the central characters within a sweeping landscape that immediately suggests movement and adventure, using the open sky and distant horizon to give the composition a strong sense of possibility.
Character scale and positioning were carefully managed to establish the relationships within the group. Yellowbird occupies the foreground as the unlikely hero, while the surrounding flock brings humour, personality and a sense of ensemble to the artwork. Their expressions help communicate the film’s playful family tone before the audience knows anything about the story.
The YellowBird title treatment
A detailed typographic approach
The title treatment was designed to feel warm, energetic and accessible, with rounded letterforms and a vivid yellow palette that connect directly with the lead character. Its bold silhouette gave the film a recognisable visual signature that could be separated from the principal artwork and used across trailers, advertising, promotional assets and international materials.
We developed a range of alternative compositions to explore different balances of character, comedy and adventure. This gave the international sales team a flexible toolkit that could respond to the preferences of individual distributors and territories while retaining a consistent identity for the film.
The campaign was extended into trade advertising, outdoor formats and supporting sales materials, with each composition carefully reworked to suit its dimensions rather than simply cropped from the one-sheet. The result was a bright, cinematic campaign that gave Yellowbird a distinctive presence across international markets and positioned its smallest character for his biggest journey.
The Yellowbird aesthetic was beautiful and we could work with some wonderful images
Animated features offer the opportunity to build an entire campaign world from the ground up. With Yellowbird, the pleasure was in finding the single image that could introduce the characters, capture the scale of the adventure and make audiences want to join the flock before the journey had even begun.
RICHARD BAKER
