John Lewis Christmas 2020:
Give a Little Love

3D Scanning for a Multi-Style Christmas Campaign

’Give a Little Love’ was John Lewis’ 2020 campaign… stop-motion, 2D animation, CG and live-action stitched into one chain of vignettes, made during a year when almost nothing about production was straightforward. We provided 3D scanning support for elements of it.

We captured reference data for the more photorealistic and semi-realistic sequences in the mix, combining point cloud processing with high-resolution photogrammetry to deliver fully textured assets and giving those segments measured, textured geometry to sit against rather than relying purely on eyeballed reference. That’s what keeps an animated sequence spatially plausible even when the visual style itself has moved away from photorealism.

Production in 2020 came with constraints most campaigns never have to think about, which put a premium on efficient capture and fast turnaround. We delivered assets quickly enough to keep the production on schedule without the usual on-set flexibility.

Holding together several different animation traditions in one coherent film is an ambitious brief in a normal year, let alone a difficult one. Our scanning contribution was a small but necessary part of what kept those disparate styles feeling like one story rather than several.