John Lewis’ “The Bear & The Hare”

From the John Lewis’ YouTube Channel:

http://youtu.be/XqWig2WARb0

Take a look at behind the scenes at the making of the 2013 John Lewis Christmas advert — The Bear & The Hare.

This is a classic Christmas tale in the John Lewis tradition with an innovative combination of animated techniques. The marriage of traditional hand-drawn 2D stop frame animation with model sets, creates a tangible world full of texture and detail that conveys the honesty behind the John Lewis Christmas message.

The Bear & The Hare is the first John Lewis campaign to embrace the emotive power of animation, a filmic technique so evocative of Christmas’s gone by.

In order to achieve this complicated combination of animation techniques, the whole film was first created in as a 3D previsualisation animatic with all the sets and characters built to scale. This allowed everything to be developed and planned alongside the model makers and animators, thus integrating the different disciplines and processes before the set was built or the characters were printed.

The 2D-animation frames (nearly 4,000) were printed onto mounted paper and cut with a laser. Feature-film stop-frame animators, then spent 6 weeks bringing the world to life.

http://youtu.be/WKfFhUdXA5M