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The year Christmas was cancelled
With a global pandemic raging at the height of the holiday season, children everywhere had lost the opportunity to meet Santa. Enter the Christmas elves at Delsym to save the day.
Delsym is a cough syrup brand that boasts 12 hour support, owned by Reckitt Benckiser, a multinational consumer goods company headquartered in England.
This year they decided to save Christmas for hundreds of families by producing the most magical experience of seeing dancing and singing elves, and ultimately meeting Mr. & Mrs. Claus.
Plan of ATTCK
Delsym’s idea was to provide a way for children to virtually meet Santa, and we were delighted to be called on to help. We quickly determined that it was possible to host the entire production over Zoom.
The execution would include multiple control rooms that communicated with several beautifully designed Santa’s workshops simultaneously. The workshops (as well as the elves’ workshop) were housed in a production studio, manned by a team of producers helping coordinate several shifts of professional Santas over the course of a twelve hour period.
Countdown to Christmas
Leading up the event, families could register for a time slot, at which point a link they received would display a link to join Santa’s workshop. Users would join into a waiting room featuring dancing and singing elves who entertained while children waited to meet Santa.
We operated several dedicated Santa channels into which children would be manually moved from the waiting room by a control room elf. After each family had spoken with Santa for a few minutes, they would be moved into a thank you room with instructions on how to exit the experience.
We used an upgraded Zoom service enabling hundreds of concurrent participants, and when we finally opened the first time slot, to everyone’s exhilaration — every available participant slot was filled instantly. For the following twelve hours straight, we welcomed over 700 families with young and old children, and even adults who were so genuinely excited to meet Santa our production crew was overjoyed with emotion.
Custom graphics and iconography
Our designer was quick to turnaround a suite of brilliant custom graphics, including these super fun animated snowing backgrounds.
Logo design
Incorporating the Delsym brand logo, we created an animated, shining campaign logo featuring Santa and his sleigh flying over the top.
Animations
Everything from the countdown timer, to the time slot sign up, to the elves workshop waiting room, to the closing thank you screen included some element of magical animation or motion graphics.
Letter from Santa
After the event concluded, we updated the website to redirect any previous Zoom and sign up links to a thank you letter from Santa himself!
Teamwork makes the dream work
This production truly exemplified excellence in teamwork and collaboration. It is almost unthinkable how such a grand production came together with such an innovative combination of video conferencing technology and world class studio production quality.
Celebration
We cannot overstate how absolutely magical this experience was for everyone involved. After such a difficult year, seeing hundreds of smiling faces for so many hours lifted our spirits and was the welcome respite everyone needed.
Credits
Producer
Dennis Plucinik
Designer
Masahiro Naruse