Another year, another classic Spindogs Christmas card, and this year’s theme is ‘A Winter Wonderland’. The Spindogs Christmas card has become somewhat of a festive favourite for both our team and our clients. Following ‘Santa’s Little Helpers’ last year, the bar was set pretty high for the 2018 edition.
The Spindogs family has grown quite a bit over the past year so we had to think bigger and more imaginative about the layout than the cards of the past. With careful contemplation and consideration, the challenge was on to find the best way to depict our expanding team (and more importantly to fit everyone in!). Here’s what we did…
STEP ONE: THE PLAN
With more team members and a more complex scene on the cards, this year’s card took a bit more planning. First order of business was to think of a theme, a setting and find a centre piece. We wanted to make this year’s card a little different, and with 32 people (and a dog) to fit in we decided on a gatefold card. Once we had set out hearts on a Winter Wonderland ice rink, we then had to plan out what pose everyone would take. In fact, we recreated some poses from last year – can you spot them?
STEP TWO: PERSPECTIVE
Much like last year we had to carefully consider the perspective because the card had to include people at various heights and distances. We teamed up with Luke from Magenta Photography and formulated a plan to split the setting up into foreground, middle ground and background. This way we could shoot each area from the appropriate angles to give the illusion of a 3D scene.
STEP THREE: PHOTOSHOOT
On the day of the shoot, we shot each group individually on a white background. The team made their way down to Magenta’s studio and got into character ensuring everyone was in their winter woollies. Many of the poses required some first class acting; I’m sure you can imagine our Senior PPC Executive Rhiannon didn’t actually lift Aled our Senior Print Designer to replicate the iconic Dirty Dancing scene. A firm favourite with the whole team and a special thank you goes to George the dog, making his debut appearance in this year’s Spindogs Christmas card. George was the perfect model!
STEP FOUR: ICE SKATES
To give everyone that realistic impression of ice skating, we photographed a pair of ice skates at various angles on our fabulous Content Editor Polly. We then matched the angle to each person’s feet. 10 ice skates were individually cropped, resized and recoloured, all in the name of authenticity!
STEP FIVE: PROPS
As the Spindogs team were taking on the parts of fun on the ice, we decided to add in a variety of photo shopped props. a little bit of acting, imagination and Photoshop magic was employed to add in these elements. Snow dust was added to Dan’s chainsaw, Gaz was given a whiskey bottle (another ode to last year’s card), Claire and Natasha were given fishing rods and Scott can be seen licking a lamppost.
STEP SIX: FINISHING TOUCHES
Little touches like shadows can make all the difference to a photo compilation like this. To make the scene feel authentic, we added shadows to each individual, as well as reflections where applicable. We finished off with skate marks criss-crossed on the ice, and adjusted the colour of the entire card to knit the image together.
As always, the end result is a collection of festive spirit and masterful graphic design and print design , which really shows! Now that we are done playing on the ice, we can get down to planning next year’s masterpiece. Watch this space!