After a brief conversation with the marketing and social media team at B&Q it became apparent that we needed to get our skates on! Some budget had been freed up last minute. This meant I was tasked with generating a number of ideas to support the Christmas campaign. I proposed 5 but being such a fan of stop motion I pushed for that one. In the end, we compromised and cut down the brief a little as we only had one studio day for animation in the end. I would have a day to light and dress the set and a puppet to turn around in a few days!  This was certainly a very ambitious project with a short deadline and fast turnaround.

I was able to borrow a bay window set for this last-minute shoot as there was not really enough time to start from scratch. I think it actually worked out rather well. I place a few Christmas trees outside our fake window and dappled them with a blue Go-bo through a trusty Source4. Finishing off with a little fake snow from guys at Snow Business in Gloucester. The idea was to go a bit over the top on the colours for this shoot to aid with the idea of fantasy.

I really wanted to incorporate a product called the “Shelter Fairy” that was in store at Christmas. Some of the profits were going to help the homeless charity Shelter. This was a stuffed toy, so far from ideal for animation, luckily I had my puppet maker on standby to do some surgery to our fairy.

Working with Tom who I had roped in as FX supervisor we put together a simple storyboard. We were limited to how many shots we could achieve and really wanted to maximise the time on set. I ran two sets side by side flitting between the two on the shoot day.