Smart and Biggar

Bringing a touch o’ whimsy to the holidays

Launching a holiday campaign with playful stop-motion and joyful messages

  • Project
    Campaign 2019

    Services
    Art Direction, Animation, Script Writing, Storyboarding, Messaging, Campaigns, Motion Graphics, Videography, Music Composition, Sound Production, Video Production, Photography

    Industry
    Law

    Roles
    Tiffany - Graphic Designer, Motion Graphics Designer, Editor

    Katie Sulatycki (Cubicle Fugitive) - Project Manager, Production Assistant

    Morgan Macleod (Cubicle Fugitive) - Account Manager, Producer

Client

About Smart & Biggar

Smart & Biggar is a highly recognized Canadian law firm that focuses on intellectual property.

Stills

Objective

Spread Cheer

Each year during the holidays, the firm typically sent a holiday post card. However, since it was the year of their rebrand launch, Smart & Biggar’s marketing team wanted to go above and beyond the status quo and produce a holiday themed video to send out and post all over social media.

DELIVERABLES

1-2 min video
Storyboards

Behind-The-Scenes

Storyboards

We started the project by creating a sequence of visual storyboards that conveyed a stop-motion production using holiday decor items to spell out inspiring messages.

Test Shots

We collected props, built a set and did a series of test shots to make sure our equipment would work for the job, and to provide the team at Smart & Biggar a visual idea of what the final outcome would look like.

The initial plan was to use Dragonframe (a software for stop-motion) to piece together the thousands of images into a video sequence at 15 fps.

Props

We used a variety of holiday-related items to bring a festive spirit to the video.

After initial production, we realized that the marketing team at Smart & Biggar needed extreme flexibility for revisions.

We realized our original approach to getting the shots wouldn’t allow for changes without a complete re-shoot of the entire production. To solve this, Tiffany rebuilt the set in her home office to recreate the scenes and shot each prop individually against a white background. Each image was then colour corrected, retouched, and had the background removed in Photoshop. Then, everything was brought together in After Effects (instead of Dragonframe) to create a final video that appeared as though it was shot in stop-motion, and allowed for more flexibility to accommodate last minute changes.

Additional credits

Previous

Physique Fitness