Christmas cards are always fun for us to work on and the majority of our work gets done solely through the use of a desktop computer or laptop. That’s why we were excited when we were contacted by Carter, Ledyard & Milburn LLP, a law firm in New York City, to do a Christmas card project that would require creating on an iPad. The client had read one of our holiday posts in which we did a stop-motion animation video Christmas card for one of our other clients. They liked the concept and asked us to do something similar for them. They originally were interested in doing a New York City skyline using watercolors to create the card. We offered them an alternative idea for painting the skyline with a more contemporary style by using an iPad and utilizing stop-motion techniques to animate it stroke-by-stroke.
We began by painting some concepts on a paper canvas to get an idea of what our scene would look like. We drew an outline of the image to get the actual skyline and then painted a couple of color schemes to see which might work best. Once we decided on the right color direction we went to work with a blank canvas using the iPad. Utilizing the App, MyBrushes Pro, and a Pogo stylus we created the New York City skyline on the iPad itself. We took over 400 photos using a Nikon D80, that was mounted on a tripod and backlit to capture the image as it was being created.
Once completed, the image was transferred from the iPad to Final Cut Pro to edit out some of the photos, add some snow effects and animate the text. Cheryl Engelhardt then added a festive, Apple-style song to fit the animation. The final product was then saved to video. We also created some matching paper Christmas cards with the completed skyline on the front. We were really happy with the final product. Since we were in a New York state-of-mind we thought we would Start Spreading the Hues. Hope you enjoy the video.
