While going through YouTube, likely because my history has a lot of videos that have to do with animation, I got recommended this John Lewis Christmas Advert called “Somewhere Only We Know”. It is a quite old one, from 2013, and it has millions of views but for some reason I had never come across it before until today and not gonna lie, it did make me tear up, likely because of the cover of the song which was very emotional with the theme of found family.
However, what I liked the most about this animation was actually how it was done. The video I watched in particular, had the animation mixed with the production of it. It is so interesting how there are three elements to it. The painted backgrounds, the environment actually physically made and painted and the character animation done, each printed piece by piece with pictures taken of each moment to composite it all together into a finished video. The most astonishing part about it was them showing the construction of the environment, the detail that goes into painting each individual rock and tree, the floor, and being able to match it all together.
I think, what I felt most while looking at it, was the need and want of doing it myself one day. Doing animation digitally is fun, do not get me wrong, I love doing it, and I love spending the hours on it myself doing each individual frame, but there is something about seeing the word physically, the whole thing actually existing in physical form. It is just such a magical way of animating, even if it does seem to be a lot of work and technicalities attached to it while taking each different picture that will put it together.
The number of hours that must have gone to making this work were simply worth it with the ending result, and personally I found a lot of inspiration on this video, being by far one of my favourite advert videos, even if I did watch it almost a decade too late.