Stop motion: The making of ‘Christmas Dreams’

It has become a Story Productions tradition to create a Christmas video at the end of the year for our clients, friends and family. Since 2020 was an exceptionally challenging year, we went all out with the task, creating a stop motion allegory that pushed the scale of any previous Christmas productions. 

Making a great stop motion film is a bit like being a swan—all poise and grace above the water, with a frenzy of activity underneath. From writing and storyboarding to photography, lighting and then post-production, colour correction and sound design, making ‘Christmas Dreams’ pulled together the entire Story Productions team in a race to produce a well-crafted stop motion film before the big day arrived.

All in all, it was a 3-week production from start to finish for our Brazilian crew. Over fifty scenes were shot in a studio, with one day of pre-light and rehearsals, five days of pre-production, five days of recording, and six days of post-production culminating in mouth-watering results.

Before we got to work on script development, the first challenge was to brainstorm and troubleshoot ideas, making sure the production was both viable and affordable. The winning idea for the 2020 Christmas film was to depict a race across a dinner table set for the festive season. If the set was to be edible, it also needed to be hardy enough to withstand the countless iterations of still frame poses that make up a stop motion film. The experience and skill of food stylist Rafael Terpins, a well-known Brazilian stop motion/documentary maker, came in handy.

THE SECRETS OF FOOD STYLING

Food stylists have a whole host of tricks up their sleeves to keep food looking tasty and fresh on camera. The main protagonists in ‘Christmas Dreams’ were a set of eclairs that would race across the dinner table. Rafael knew that traditional chocolate icing wouldn’t work as it melts easily and doesn’t like being messed with constantly. ”Since there is a lot of manipulation by hand, we had to replace a small piece of the icing for each scene,” he explains. “And so we found that fondant was the best solution.” Over six days of rehearsal and production, a whopping 126 eclairs were used.

The repeated application of fondant icing to racecar eclairs was just one part of the detailed process behind the scenes of our delicious stop motion film.

“With stop motion, you really need to plan everything very accurately,” explains Nick Story, Executive Producer at Story Productions. “You need to have storyboarding, you need to be lined up with the story, exactly what you’re going to do. And the other challenge on top of that was actually manipulating food in the story.”

INTO A HYPER-MACRO UNIVERSE

Every element was considered for how it fits within the larger theme of the story. With a short film on a small scale, a LAOWA 24mm lens was employed to help transport the viewer into a hyper-macro universe. And so we are transported into the miniature world of our protagonists, who overwhelm the villain—a black-gloved hand representing 2020 in a great performance by Nick’s forearm—and cross the finish line into a new year.

The sound was carefully selected and layered to add drama and ambience. The soundtrack to the eclair race had moments of samba, funk and other rhythms. “I would say 70% of the film really happens in that post-production moment when you combine image and sound,” Nick says.

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