Airbnb / Frontdesk

Project Insight

Turning a global workplace strategy into a short film.

Airbnb's Space team had a difficult story to tell its own people: the company was reshaping its global office network, stepping back from some locations to invest deeply in others.

We were brought in directly - no agency in between - to turn a strategy into something people would actually want to watch.

Challenge

Consolidation stories are easy to get wrong. Told plainly, they read as retreat.

Our job was to reframe the same set of facts as focus: fewer offices, better offices, and a clear reason why.

That meant rewriting the script before touching a single frame.

Script & Voice

We tightened the original narrative, cut the on-screen text down to a handful of moments, and let the voice-over carry the argument.

The tone had to sound like Airbnb — warm, plainspoken, confident — not like a corporate announcement.

Casting, recording, music, and mix all happened before animation began. The story had to land on audio alone first.

A World Built from Parts

The film opens on a white-on-white globe, continents surfacing as clean outlines, offices rising out of it in 3D.

Every building was engineered to move in pieces — growing, extruding, stacking, receding, so that strategy could be read as architecture.

Most were designed as archetypes; San Francisco was modelled on the real HQ. Airbnb Red marked investment. Airbnb Cereal set the type.

Conclusion

"Front Desk" gave Airbnb's Space team one artifact to carry a two-phase strategy into rooms where a deck would have stalled.

It also proved something we keep proving: the writing is the design. Half this project happened in the script, long before the first render.