Directors Lucia Aniello and Anna Mantzaris blended live-action and stop-motion seamlessly. Award-winning DP James Laxton captured live-action scenes, while UK DP Donna Wade handled stop-motion. A first for a production of this scale, we shot stop-motion entirely on iPhone, and adapted DragonFrame software UI. Despite this, we manually adjusted color, exposure, and VFX for thousands of frames.

The world is going through a severe empathy crisis. Decreased social interaction, obsessing over our own struggles, doomsday scrolling, it all breeds hopelessness and apathy – why bother trying to understand what others are going through when everyone is hurting in some way?

Creativity has long been the bridge to understanding and empathizing with others. As a brand that believes creativity has the ability to improve our lives, Apple aimed to give the world a nudge in the right direction.

What better time than the holiday for a reminder to draw that bridge to understanding the people in our lives? With just an iPhone in our pocket, can we see the world through a new lens and invite others in?

In this film, told in both live-action and stop-motion, we follow the daily struggles of a scrappy young animator as she processes her world through her craft of animation. In several tit-for-tat moments, we watch as her disgruntled boss makes her life miserable, and she in turn, makes her puppet’s life miserable. It’s not until her boss gives her a holiday gift and she sees him out in the world alone and sad that her image of him begins to crack and she begins to see him as just another person dealing with his own issues. After this pivotal moment, she decides to change her story and make things right, both in her animation and in the real world.

The brief was to create a heartfelt holiday campaign that moved the world, and gave expression to Apple’s long-held core company value of “the power of creativity to improve our lives.” In an increasingly fragmented world, where individuals lack empathy, how can creativity allow us to to see others for who they truly are? Our goal was to show how seeing others through a new lens can change how we see the world and others.

Just before Thanksgiving, the brand released our emotional film showcasing how iPhone, Mac, and ingenuity foster unexpected connections. The campaign was built to scale in a new way for Apple by leveraging owned and talent channels, adding an additional 4M+ organic views for the campaign.

Our stop-motion film was a first of it’s kind, shot entirely on iPhone. This production scale has never been achieved with this level of talent on anything other than a pro camera. The iPhone was used for 250+ hrs of animation & captured 20,000+ images. We even worked with DragonFrame to change their app for our production and still had to adjust color/exposure/VFX for thousands of frames manually.

Capturing only 3 seconds per day over two weeks for 90 seconds of stop motion meant we had a math problem, resulting in two sets and 250 hours spent on animation. Adding the challenge of shooting entirely on iPhone, the production was a key collaboration between agency, production, and the best stop motion talent London.