McDonald’s Christmas – Francesco Campobasso

MCDONALD'S CHRISTMAS

To celebrate Christmas, McDonald's wanted to give away some gifts to their customers in a big Christmas countdown. The main brief was clear and simple. Some gifts are playing around in a calendar and after some action, they are bursting to reveal McDonald's' products.

MAKING

These are some of the guidelines that we created during the project to help the team and the client to understand how we wanted to animate and give life to the boxes.

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These are examples of how we wanted the deformations on the characters to work. We needed to maintain the shapes loose and organic. The gifts are alive and they should have a purpose with their movements. Our poses had to contain both actions as physical movements and acting as in the emotional and mental energy that causes the actions.

Character definition was possible using non-figurative objects, defining emotion, mood and personality. We did not use their physical appearance or their physical attributes (faces, arms, etc.) but the manner they behaved and the shapes they took.

We were trying to communicate emotion and purpose with literally 8 lines. For this, we suggested approaching the animation of our “characters” as traditional animators would do. Lines of action, silhouette, shapes and posing were our weapons here.

The stories for each action were worked and reworked in around 4 iterations each until we came up with the clearest story that we could achieve with the amount of time we had at our disposal. This is just one of those iterations.