PROBLEM:

What can we #makewithmohawk? Mohawk values sustainability and has created an Environmental Program to shed light on their sustainable paper practices. Our challenge was to create a social media campaign that brings Mohawk’s Keaykolour line of paper to life to engage creative eco-conscious customers and ensure the brand is at the forefront of their mind when they are seeking sustainable resources.

GOAL:

For our customer, we wanted to create environmentally-focused, playful, and attention-grabbing vignettes that delighted viewers and inspired creative endeavors.  

As designers our secondary goal was to develop a new skill; stop motion. Given the product and the story the customer wanted to tell, we believed paper should be experienced dimensionally in motion. We knew despite the fact none of us had worked in stop motion before, this medium was the best way to achieve the customer goal.

CONCEPT:

“What will you make today?”  To highlight Mohawk’s focus on sustainability, and to resonate with eco-conscious consumers, we created a forest scene entirely out of paper, complete with a plethora of trees, plants, and animals. Since Instagram is the most popular platform for ad purchases, we curated our stop motion for Instagram-worthy stories.

TEAMMATES:
Tanya Sheremeta
Wilfred Aldrich

MY ROLE: Art Direction, Storyboarding, Set Design, Illustration, Photography, Studio Lighting, and Project Management.

TOOLS: Capture Pro, After Effects, Illustrator, Scissors and Laser Cutter .

TIMEFRAME:
10 weeks

01 THE BUILD

With the concept locked in, we began storyboarding and illustrating assets. After dedicating hours of testing and iterating on paper animal and plant designs that could stand on their own, we engineered a system that enabled our illustrations to stand upright. We then took each illustration to the laser cutter, successfully completed our proof of concept and began creating the scene. The final steps were hours of pining, gluing and folding the paper until the set came to life.

02 LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION!

With the set built and secured, we began planning our lighting and filming approach. Having worked for a photographer before starting design school, I had the knowledge and skills to quickly and efficiently design, set-up, and execute filming. We choose to shoot in the studio because we had about 8 stories and vignettes to capture that required consistent lighting which we knew would require two days of shooting. We tethered the camera, set up lights, and started shooting our scenes.

05 DEMOLITION

The most exciting but devastating part of the project was building the set knowing we would eventually destroy it. As part of our filming plan, we wanted to use the technique of reverse motion to create the effect of the forest blooming right before your eyes. After all the small vignette scenes were filmed, we got our scissors out and started cutting. We cut the paper down frame by frame for over 2 hours. Stop motion is deceivingly time-consuming. At 15 frames per second, you are shooting hours and thousands of frames to make only a few magical seconds of video.