What is is - Peep

What i see - Peep

About stop:watch & Tineke Meirink

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I realised that the story had to be told very carefully, because of the surprise at the end. I didn’t want the audience to think half way the video: “they’re trying to convince me so much that this character wants to make a snow machine that it’s propably something else he’s building”. Also, I wanted to tell the story according to the scedule of the song, so when you see him working on his rocket you’d hear William sing “Lass Es Schneien”, have the verses of the song while he’s walking in the city, the rocket had to be finished at the bridge of the song and I needed a proper moment for the impact of the rocket.

I thought about what the tools and technical field of work of the snowman character should look like and thought of this guy Gregor, who also works in the building I have my studio in. Gregor is a product designer and a technical wizzard. I based the snowman character’s way of working and the interior of his barn on Gregor and his studio. You can see Gregor at 1:00 min in the making of the video.

I decided that the whole world of the video should be consisting of flat objects cut out of wood (like the cars and the people in the city) except the snowman character and the barn he’s working in. Later I realised that the Chinese electro store, where he gets his supplies, should also be a bit more 3d than the surroundings.

After making all these decisions I started working on all details and the designs together with my three interns and Danièle Knirim (visual artist who did an lot of production work).

I designed the snowman character, starting with a wooden pole and shaved it untill I thought it was good. I had to design a way to create a walkcycle for it. You can see in the Making Of how I solved that (we had 32 different sets of feet). My intern Robert then had to practise the walkcycle, because the snowman character was going to walk with a cart that he pulls forward with every step he takes.

While shooting the first scenes we were still building all parts for the other scenes.

At the end we only had to place the advertising videos behind the greenscreens in the city. We made the ad videos in After Effects and Illustrator.

Knowing this, it makes it even more fun to watch the Making Of…