Familiar with The Barkers’ signature flair, Crate & Barrel reached out to them to add some “Barker Sparkle” to its holiday spots for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve. To infuse the spots with magic The Barker’s decided to mix stop motion with live action.

And when The Barkers do stop motion? They go all out. “We don’t like things looking choppy–so we do a lot of small moves that we manipulate later in post, to keep the motion more fluid—speeding up and slowing down the way things in real life do,” Chris explains. When you toss a ball up, for example, it slows down until it falls. Then it speeds up again. “That was the kind of stop motion we wanted to create for Crate & Barrel.”

To achieve this, The Barkers did over 200 individual item moves for the Christmas table spread alone. “This gave our animators a lot of wiggle room in post to play with which items appeared and disappeared, how they moved and when,” says Chris.

Once the stop-motion magic played out on screen for each Holiday spot, The Barkers designed a practical lighting change that happened in camera for the switch to “real life”, when the talent comes into each scene.

Adding a little extra Holiday magic? Chris wrote the song for the Christmas spot. “I was really into voice sampling at the time,” he says.  To get the desired sound he was after, Chris tapped local a cappella groups to sing a different scales and vocalizations that felt “Christmas-y” and then created the final tune by sampling and pitching their voices. Barker Sparkle, indeed!