Our Work / Skype Christmas banners

It was a blue, blue Christmas

Skype is a really great way for families to stay in touch, even if they live a long way away from each other. Because it’s free, people talk more naturally without worrying about the cost. And video calls or conference calls mean they can express themselves better.

We went to Skype with an idea for a campaign for the holiday season. It went like this:

• Lots of people get new technology in their stockings at Christmas. In 2008 it was all about netbooks and smartphones, and we knew people would be looking for cool stuff to do with them.
• And Christmas is also the time of year when people think about getting back in touch with friends and family they haven’t spoken to for a while.
• Put these two thoughts together and you’ve got the perfect opportunity to get new people to try Skype. They agreed, and asked us to make on online advertising campaign.

Now, we wanted to make sure we captured all the emotion of these festive family reunions. But we didn’t have the budget for a big film shoot. But we had been hankering after doing some claymation, so we decided to give it a go.

This was a 100% in-house Albion production. We wrote the scripts, designed and made the characters (from Fimo), shot the stop-frame animation, recorded the sound, and built the Flash banners. All in an intense 4-day period of 18 hour days and lots and lots of coffee.

We’re rather proud of the results.

Here’s a little film we made showing how it was done.

Tagged as: Banners, Community, Digital, Skype