A Christmas Film

A short Christmas film for the Public Service

Christmas is a special time of the year when most people are usually somehow nicer. For years, Christmas time has also been synonymous with great commercials, the kind that people enjoy watching and sharing. The John Lewis adverts immediately come to mind, of course, and at motion blur, we always look forward to their next instalment. Thanks to them and several others, Christmas time is surely an interesting time for commercials.

In 2022, we had the opportunity to create a commercial for this time of the year and we loved it. Servizz Pubbliku wanted to produce an advert to wish the Maltese public well. The brief was simple, “we need to wish season’s greetings to the Maltese public while showing a number of employees within the public sector”.

They gave us a lot of liberty and we started putting down to paper several concepts and story ideas to propose. After a few days, we got together in a virtual meeting and we settled on the general concept and storyline. Within a few days, we had written the script and had it approved.

One of the generally shared pearls of wisdom within our industry is to avoid working with kids and animals, as besides the obvious continuity issues, any shoot with any of them involved will take way longer than if you worked with trained actors. For this shoot, we ignored that caution completely - our actors were mostly kids and we also had to work with dogs and horses. We went into the project knowing that we couldn’t have endless long takes and complex shots. We needed to tell the story in a series of short well-executed shots.

We coordinated with several Government entities, from the Police cavalry for the horses, customs for the dogs, civil protection, Enemalta and public works. It is never easy to coordinate getting many people together, choosing the right locations where you can light properly, have the big vehicles fit in narrow roads or locations and generally get the right canvas for the scene.

We had to take care of a number of logistics, like permits to close the roads and avoid parked cars. For using the high-up, we also had to take further safety precautions since one of the actors had to climb on board. We even had to order a special harness.

We built the cart, which the kids were hauling around, specifically for the shoot and since we filmed way before Christmas, we had to put in a lot of energy to decorate every single location for the occasion. We even set up a Christmas tree for the final scene.

We filmed over three days in various locations, timing the shoots to get sunlight for the early scenes and then went on for the night scenes. The kids, the horses, and the dogs, whom everyone was scared of, pulled off a great performance and even the adults did well. We were happy with the shoot and so it was time for post-production.

The storyline and the well-executed shoot made the edit quite straightforward but our editors needed to tweak here and there to make the cuts fit naturally between the different shots, find the right music, and add the necessary ambience and sound effects before sending the project to the motion designer and eventually the colourist for the final export for TV and social media.

From the feedback we could gather, the video was well-received. At the time of writing, it had close to 250 thousand views on YouTube alone.