Our brief for jumping on board this film, was “let’s make it a romp!” We couldn’t have jumped onto that band wagon any faster! And making a Christmas film, in May, was an unexpected delight. The team, led by director Becky Read, were open to being playful and having a lot of fun, which in turn made for a great early Christmas experience.
Our contribution to the London based edit was an array of in film sequences and title, see reel for a selection of our work and then read more about specifics below!
Social Media
As part of the story unfolded on social media – we created an array of Facebook and Twitter sequences for the film, using both full screen technique and an interactive technique which sat over the live action during the more playful moments.
Emails
As the narrative involved characters emailing each other from one house in the neighbourhood to the other – we also explored options for this, and how we could be relatively playful in our execution of these moments. We settled on tracked iconography and text over a drone shot of the neighbourhood, which felt aligned with the spirit of the overly dramatised exchange.
Desktop
We had a number of in film sequences where we decided it would be advantageous to navigate a desktop from the viewpoint of our main character. In the spirit of all things fun and Christmas, we sourced a particularly questionable desktop background and had fun with the smaller details of the sequence – adding a little Santa hat to the folders, and changing the mouse icon to be a Christmas tree. It was a little too much fun playing with these elements!
End Cards
We explored an array of creative avenues for both the title card and for the end cards, a selection of which can be seen below. With our main character being so OTT and obsessed with times of past – we were interested in leaning into a nostalgic aesthetic. We looked specifically at those sickly sweet kitch Christmas cards, and created original illustrations for our end cards. This was a lot of fun to work on, but unfortunately didn’t make the final cut of the film – into the graveyard of wonder they go!
We also worked on creating a typographical look for the film, for specific beats which had an additional narrative function. We used kinetic animation for these in film moments.
We really enjoyed collaborating with the team at Dorothy Street Pictures and Apple on the film, Christmas can never come too early!
Titles and Motion Design by: Past Curfew
Design Director: Allison Brownmoore
Assistant Motion Producer: Lucy Beavis
Designers: Kevin Smy, Ned Jackson, Callum Welch