SNFCC XMAS23 - Xmas Character Totems

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SNFCC Xmas23 - Xmas Character Totems

For those who've been following us, you most likely know SNFCC as well…

For those who haven’t, please have a look at the short description below:
"SNFCC stands for Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center, situated in Athens, Greece. This cultural center draws visitors from all over the country.
Christmas is a special time for SNFCC, attracting thousands of visitors who come to celebrate the holiday season."
So for the 7th(!!) time in a row, we've created a Christmas World for SNFCC.

Here you can see the 2017's , 2018's , 2019's, 2020’s, 2021’s and 2022's Campaign!

This year, the whole campaign was about Character Totems!

Geometric shapes doing their thing, rearranging to form character totems in various shapes.

Vintage Wooden Xmas Toys

With a touch of nostalgia, this year's concept draws inspiration from the vintage wooden Christmas toys of our childhood. Back when decorating the Christmas tree meant more than just glossy glass sphere balls and generic ornaments. Those wooden toys and characters added an extra warmth to the decoration, each telling a story and earning extra points for tapping into our childhood nostalgia and the child within all of us.

Totems, Shapes and References.

Drawing inspiration from those classic wooden toys, we examined their design, realizing that they are essentially composed of fundamental geometric shapes. It's a bit like the timeless and age-old concept of totems.

So, the idea was: what if we could stack these shapes together, creating unique characters that, when combined, form a composition—a Character Totem? Picture these Character Totems coming alive, narrating the Christmas stories, events, and happenings at the Cultural Center.

We also drew inspiration from the vintage costumes of the Bauhaus Ballet, especially the Triadic Ballet by Oskar Schlemmer. This ballet uses a similar approach, seamlessly blending different geometric shapes to craft unique characters.

Bringing those wooden toys into the present, we've given them a playful and contemporary twist. Now, they come alive with shapes, patterns, and decorative elements.

Some Process

Our process always begins with sketches and exploring the totems.

Our goal was to blend various shapes into totems inspired by SNFCC's Christmas events.

Totem Characters- Design

After the sketches, we take our characters and transform them into vectors, setting the stage for the animation.

Color Pallet

We decided on a festive color palette, incorporating the classic Red and Green as the dominant Xmas colors, with a touch of Gold to elevate the festive vibe. After introducing a mix of additional colors and tones – voila!

The Countdown Once again? Hmm No countdown!

Every year making this campaign, our key point was a countdown. For every day of November, we created a 10-15 sec animated video, which promoted the events that took place at the SNFCC during the celebrating season.

This year we decided along with the SNFCC Team to “kill” the countdown and instead, we decided to make a weekly video, which includes the actions and events in thematic sections

So we grouped our actions into 5 thematic sections, creating a more extended video every week, accompanied by various other applications. In the beginning of each video, we had an intro frame as a chapter with the name of each week's video.

So we made storyboards for each video of every week, looking for funny ways for the totems to tell the stories.

Animation, Edits, Motion

Here's an edit featuring a compilation of moments from our campaign, offering you a glimpse into our motion world.

When it comes to animation, we use After Effects, where we translate all the vectors into shapes and carefully set the keyframes for each totem to move across our universe.

Social Media, Animated Banners Screens and more

As always, our world came alive through Instagram and Facebook posts and also took over the SNFCC website. We also designed various applications tailored for different screens and formats

Printed Material and Merch

Beyond the digital realm, our characters found their way into a variety of applications. From posters on metal stands to large vinyl stickers, cups, Xmas cards, and more, we had the pleasure to see our creations come to life in different forms.

Our Giant Physical totem!

The highlight of this year's campaign was the creation of a physical installation—a huge Christmas Totem composition that stands out in the cultural center's area.

We teamed up with the architecture and craft studio Ludd, crafting this wooden installation from scratch.

You can take a look at the process here: ↓ ↓ ↓

Credits and Special Thanks!

Thank you guys for making it to the end of our Xmas Design Totems project.
A big shoutout to SNFCC for placing their trust in us for the 7th consecutive year and to all the amazing people who worked on this project.

P.S.1. Again drop us a line for ideas, for next year’s 8th-in-a-row campaign. What would you like to see?
P.S.2. What has been your favorite campaign out of the 7 so far? Drop us a line.

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Client: SNFCC (Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center)
Created by: Odd Bleat
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Creative Direction / Art Direction: Yannis Zoumakis, Manos Gerogiannis
Illustrations: Yannis Zoumakis
Animation: Manos Gerogiannis, Spyros Loran, Nektarios Karanikas,
Production: Marianna Papachristodoulou
Music, Sound Design, Mixing and Mastering : MD Recording Studios, Nikos Michalodimitrakis
Graphic Design: Bend
Installation Creation: Ludd

Merry Christmas to you all!