Give a Puffin book this Christmas

Puffin Books is one of the UK’s best-loved children’s publishers, with a backlist spanning generations of classic and contemporary titles for young readers.

Rather than promoting any single title, Puffin’s Christmas campaign was about something simpler and bigger: the idea of giving a book, any book, to a child for Christmas, and the worlds it could open up for them. We were asked to create a series of five films built around the kind of imaginative themes that get every child’s imagination running – space, travel, jungles, and more.

Filming with children is always something of a balancing act. Usually we just let them play and have fun so they forget the camera’s even there. This shoot was trickier than most, because the kids weren’t just being themselves on camera; they needed to act out specific actions and reactions to imaginary worlds that would only appear once the animation was added on top, meaning a fair bit of direction and imagination on their part as well as ours.

All of that hand-drawn animation work – the rockets, dinosaurs and aeroplanes bringing each child’s imagined world to life – was created by Jack Bennett, layered over the live-action footage to make it feel as though the children were really there.

The films ran across Puffin’s social channels for six weeks in the run-up to Christmas, right through the key gifting season.