Problem.

Most people don’t know why they follow most Christmas traditions, regardless of how odd they are when you stop to think about them. This was precisely what we needed our work to do.

Solution.

Our film aimed to highlight that not all Christmas traditions are harmless and provoke our audience to recognise the absurdity of celebrating the season of goodwill with the corpse of a tortured animal.

Set to a reworked version of a traditional Christmas carol (‘Deck the halls’), sung by Jane Horrocks (fresh from starring in Chicken Run 2) our film features a naive young turkey exploring a variety of fun traditions in a charming, Christmassy village... before realising she is part of the cruellest tradition of all.

To create national awareness with zero media spend, we needed a rich, warm, Christmassy film to make our dark twist even more powerful. But the look we wanted doesn’t come cheap, and we only had £25k for production. So, it meant a modular approach was used to streamline the character design, and a lot of hard work and goodwill from our animator who created the entire 90s spot single-handedly.

The film was created using a mixture of 3D and 2D techniques – 3D to build the world and animate the characters in Maxon Cinema 4D, and 2D to give the spot its distinct painterly appearance using textures created in Photoshop.

Results.

It was viewed over 700k times, earned 20 pieces of press coverage and was featured on two national news shows.

Many of us are guilty of sleepwalking into ordering turkey at Christmas without actually knowing why or, in many cases, even particularly enjoying it. So we wanted to highlight that doing something just because it’s tradition without actually questioning why and what the consequences are isn’t really good enough.

Steve Hawthorne, Creative Director at House 337