Gifts that Give

Produced by Partizan and directed by Michael Gracey (the Greatest Showman), the campaign celebrates the generosity behind an M&S gift and will see the retail giant donate £1 million to the Neighbourly Foundation, a charity that supports local community causes across the UK.

To help bring the campaign to life, Framestore was tasked with embellishing a winter wonderland, brimming with christmassy nostalgia.

“During times of big festive ads with huge creatures and heavy CGI environments, it was refreshing to do some more traditional 2D oriented work” said Luigi Russo, 2D Lead at Framestore.

He added: “We were set a challenge of balancing 4 shoot days with unique weather conditions, that we had to make look like a uniform magical Christmas morning. We had a great team of compositors and DMP artists, who had a lot of fun adding snow and stitching shots together. Even if a lot of the work done can be classified as "invisible VFX", we still had a lot of toys to play with, like set scanning and tracking, plus tons of camera projections and cards”.

The campaign was graded by Steffan Perry, at Framestore’s sister company, Company3 and will run for six weeks across TV, VOD, cinema, digital, social and print.