Galeria Kaufhof

A dream project and an interesting challenge.

I was asked by Geert Jansen at Artbox to direct a film for the German agency Scholz & Friends and Galeria Kaufhof in Germany, which would come after an existing in-store visual campaign and told the story behind those visuals. One part of the film would be shown in a pop-up book style, and the end part would be in the visual style of the existing campaign.
The first challenge came from the script. The writing process had apparently been long and complicated and I had to take it as it was. But I was still free of choosing the flow of the storytelling and that was important. This was for an online campaign, meaning we could choose and manage the length of the film as we pleased.
Then came the design challenge. The visuals already existed in-store, meaning we had to keep a lot of the look for the end part of the film (But the Artbox team was going to push the look to a greater standard!). We had to find a way to make the two parts work together.
Although we were working in 3D, I wanted to tell the story as if we could have made the book for real. It would work towards the mood we needed for the film. I wanted to remind the audience of a old sense of wonder one has when listening to a bedtime story, waiting excitingly for that page to turn.
The film quickly generated a lot of interest. And the agency gave us a lot of freedom when it came to choosing how we would visualise the story.
Pop-up books are really liked and done a lot in animation so we had to work hard to give it a unique look and feel. It needed to be for an adult audience so contemporary art and paper craft were my source of inspiration rather than other pop-up books.
I knew I wanted to work with Rens Pluijm and Sebastiaan Roestenburg from the Ambassadors Sound on this. The music was going to tell the story and the sound design was going to pull the audience into the scenes. It was not a hard choice. They made it great. As always.
It was the first time I worked with Artbox and their team and it was a very positive experience. They brought a great energy to the project from the get go, made me feel right at home. This was very helpful to get a flow of ideas going because the schedule was reasonable but we couldn't waste any time.
And in the end I was very happy to finally be able to work with Flame artist Lise Prud'homme and her team at Darling Posts, who stepped in to bring the whole film together visually.

A few weekends and evenings went into this project.
I am proud of the result, I learned a lot and met good people along the way. What else could you want?