Corporate Christmas Card Animation

Now, it is not often that I feel the need to post about what I do at work. Yes I am blessed to be working with possibly THE best group of colleagues in the world and sometimes get to go visit some cool places, but lets face it, sometimes work is just work. This years Corporate Holiday card however, (not politically correct enough to call it Christmas card) was one particular project that I was so excited to be involved with. We had so much fun working on it.

The talented Cynthia Enciso was the brains and ideas girl behind this years e-card and designed a story board and all of the images for a stop motion animation. Cliff Brunson was technology wizard, camera man  and general creative wizard and set everything up to enable the making of the animation.

I somehow managed to get involved when Cliff asked if I could make snowflakes out of paper! Ha! I spent hours making them as a kid, (and lets face it, as an adult too) and so felt that I could probably have a good attempt at making some that would meet the high standard of creativity of Cliff and Cynthia (I had seen Cynthia's attempt at a snowflake so I was quietly confident!).

Having to find a way that we could film vertically, and having no specialist equipment, Cliff demonstrated one of my favourite sayings - 'necessity is the mother of invention' - and raided his garage to see what he could put together. A series of tri-pods, A frames and a load of clamps later, the above contraption was born.

Shot by shot, the mountains were moved up and then the trees were moved in. Each piece is moved slightly before the next photo is taken.

Then my snowflakes were brought into action and rotated - I even punched out all of the snow dots. Each dot had to be moved after each photo. The difficulty here was remembering which ones had been moved and which ones had not. If I never see another snow dot again I will be very happy!

Finally all the lettering is coloured in by hand. See - everyone says that marketing is just playing around with coloured pencils - here is the proof!!

Anyway, we had so much fun making this. It took eight hours of shooting to produce 1.14mins of footage, but we were all really happy with the end result. Please watch it and I hope you enjoy it!