The Dear talks Bear and Hare for John Lewis

With the John Lewis campaign for Christmas 2013 newly launched we caught up with Blinkink's Elliot Dear, co-director of the spot alongside Hornet's Yves Geleyn, to discuss how The Bear and the Hare was brough to life.

Below you can read Dear's account and, above, watch the making of special.

What was the brief you received from the agency, when did you receive it, and did you know immediately how you would approach it?

Sometime in April my producer, Bart Yates, phoned and asked me to come in to the office as something very exciting and top-secret had come in and he thought I'd be interested in it. 

The first thing I really knew about the brief was handed to me in the form of two A4 print-outs: One was the general story of The Bear and the Hare and the other was a selection of quite low-res images, mostly from Bambi (from what I remember). These images turned out to be references for the mood and tone of the ad, but not necessarily the animation technique.

As a production company we knew that we'd been asked to pitch because of the way Blinkink/Hornet approach moving image and animation with regards to craft and technique. It was clear that the agency were looking for something with heart - something textured and tangible that would evoke feelings of nostalgia, but would also seem fresh and different from existing animations.

You worked with Hornet's Yves Geleyn as co-director on this project; tell us how you worked together and what each of you brought to the project?

I had only ever met Yves once before, briefly, as he was leaving the Blink building months ago. It was our producers that decided that we would work well together, and because we were younger, less established and less experienced than the competition, we would be stronger as a pair - two showreels are better than one. They believed that we had what it took to get the ad made, but the difficulty was in convincing other people that we did. 

The next time I met him he'd only just got off the Eurostar from Paris and I was handing him something to hold up or tape together for a test I was doing. I don't think he'd even put his bag down yet. Luckily, we turned out to be very compatible. We have similar tastes in aesthetics and our work shares the same kind of tone, although I'd say that Yves work is more jolly and upbeat than mine, and my work is more quiet and atmospheric.

I found that during production we were both meticulous in different ways: Yves has a very logical approach to what's going on in a scene. He would be the one working out which direction the sun should be shining and casting shadows and where the snow would've melted etc, which is great for the overall flow of the film. He's good with continuity and really pays attention to it, which is invaluable.

I was finding myself concentrating more on the framing and lighting of the shots, working closely with Toby Howell, our DP, to get it feeling right. I spent a long time discussing the sets with John Lee, the senior model maker and production designer. I couldn't resist getting stuck in on set, working with the models and helping with the precision dressing of the environments.

What were your points of reference for how you wanted the film to look?

We had to feel our way through what the agency and client wanted to see, and it wasn't as simple as them being able to point at something and say "we want that!".

There was a lot of trial and error involved: digging for references from Disney, but trying to find characters and images that felt restrained and subtle. We knew that if we got the tone wrong and went over the top we'd loose the audience - particularly the British audience. 

For the 2D animation we found references in animation and illustration: Brother Bear, Wathership Down, Beatrix Potter, E.H Shepard etc. For the stop-motion and miniatures side of things we looked at Fantastic Mr Fox, The Wind In The Willows, Paranorman and so on. We were lucky that we ended up with a team consisting mostly of people who had already worked on some of those productions.

It was also important that we were paying attention to real environments, and studied hundreds of images of the British countryside and the Highlands. It was important to the client that we didn't make a North American Redwood forest or a Canadian mountain range. Yves and I spent a long time with [production designer] John Lee analysing what details help to differentiate the British countryside from other places in the world.

The spot has a great mixture of the modern and the classical in its animation style; how important was it to achieve that look?

The technique we've used is fairly unprecedented. There are very few films out there where this animation process has been used, especially on this scale, and if they are out there, they're very hard to find. The fact that we couldn't find anything to show as reference for what we wanted to make meant that the best example was our own test video. 

It was really important to seamlessly merge the two mediums, not only because we wanted it to look great, but because we still wanted the film to have an overall familiarity to it. Much of the emotional power behind the ad is coming from the nostalgia that people feel, because the imagery can be compared to old animated films that many people will have loved as children. We had to make sure that we weren't making an image that was in any way jarring or distracting - after all, the story is the most important thing.

Tell us a bit about the processes of the project.

The technique involves the characters being animated in 2D, traditionally, with pencil and paper. Aaron Blaise was lead animator on the Bear and Hare characters whilst the rest of the studio at Premise Entertainment in Florida -  lead by Dom Carola - worked on the clean-up and background characters. The images were then scanned and vectorised so that we had an image sequence we could develop on the computer.

Once the final line work had been signed off by us and the agency, it was transferred to our studio in London where our own team of animators and colourists worked on colouring the characters and adding light and shadow. Because it needed to appear that the characters were reacting to the light on the sets, we needed the colourists to have a dialogue with myself, Yves and the DP about the angle and direction of the light and where the shadows would be. So our team of animators actually worked at the studio we were shooting at.

The models and sets were partly constructed at John Lee's workshop in Shepperton before being transported to Clapham Road Studios where they would be put together, dressed and shot. We had a three week build and pre-light phase at Clapham Road prior to the shoot, and then actually shot the stop-motion animation for a further six weeks - having animation still fed to us from Florida until one week before the end.

Once the animation was shot, the compositing and clean-up was relatively light as we had aimed to achieve almost everything in-camera. We had a compositor on set throughout the shoot working on removing the rigs that held the characters in place, removing backgrounds so that the skies could be laid behind the action and so on. This meant that by the time we had finished filming we already had a head start with the post production.

The element effects, like snow falling and dust particles, were filmed in front of a black background at 50fps. We scattered the same powdered paper we had been using on the sets using a sieve. It worked well and meant that we didn't need to resort to CG particle effects over the top of an otherwise traditionally made film.

In short, what the technique allowed us to achieve was depth and texture - something often lacking in some purely 2D animated pieces and, in some people's opinion, CG. We had identified that it's the human error and imperfection that is inherent in a process like this that actually brings the heart and charm to it. By placing the characters physically in the environments we were able to get real shadows and interactions with the snow and foliage - If you look closely it doesn't actually make sense that this would happen. It's essentially compositing in-camera.

What was the most difficult part of the whole project?

The most difficult part of the project was remembering that we were making an advert. I've had the luxury of working with some incredibly talented and passionate people on this, many of them from backgrounds in feature film. We've all spent so much time and energy on making this look like a movie, and it does - but the fact is that it isn't a movie. It's an advert, and it's job is to make John Lewis appeal to as many people as possible at Christmas. 

So the difficult thing is not getting upset when we're asked to make the tree bigger, or the present more brightly coloured or to add more snow. It's someone else's party, and if they want a bigger tree, they get one.

The music is always an integral part of the John Lewis Christmas campaign; tell us about that aspect to the spot.

The music on a John Lewis ad is always a sensitive subject. As a brand they have gained a rhythm with their campaigns, and this is something that has worked well and they're very proud of it. 

From the first pitch animatic we were working with a placeholder: a piece from Finding Nemo by the composer Thomas Newman. It's a very beautiful and meandering piece that fitted uncannily well with the story. It influenced the overall mood of the film during production a lot; very cinematic and dynamic.

The final decision on the music happened quite late in the process and I think continuity with the previous films was certainly a consideration. 

The John Lewis Christmas campaign has very quickly become 'event advertising'; how daunting a prospect was it to take it on?

I knew that the John Lewis ads were popular, but I never really realised how popular until the morning this ad went live. I'm honestly fascinated by how much people care about it. I suppose I'm naive - we also don't have a television in our flat, so TV isn't really a thing. I never really felt too daunted by the project from a production point of view - everyone who began working on it was very positive and optimistic from the start and I didn't think we could go too far wrong with such a strong team.

Your directorial stablemate, Dougal Wilson, had directed the previous two John Lewis Christmas spots; did you discuss the project with him at all?

I did sit down with Dougal once or twice at the very start of the project, during the storyboarding phase. He kindly offered his thoughts on the storytelling and we batted some things back and forth. He'd suggest something but then humbly discard it in a food-for-thought kind of way. It was comforting to learn that there was no clear right or wrong way to approach it and that even the more experienced directors don't see the solid solutions immediately. 

Was waiting to see the reaction to the spot nerve-wracking?

Waiting for people's reactions is quite nerve-wracking. I think it's important for me to remind myself that when millions of people see something, there will always be a few who don't like it. Also, if everyone loved it, it'd be time to start worrying about society.

Describe your perfect Christmas Day...

As long as I'm not having to do an emergency re-edit of the John Lewis advert, it'll do just fine.