BUCK Holiday Gift
2020
What has six animations, four colorways, 1,152 individually carved pieces, and an unnecessarily complicated output process? Our 2020 Holiday Gift!
So uh, what’s this thing I got in the mail?
For this year’s holiday gift, we created and memorialized a series of custom BUCK animations into unique wood-carved art pieces. Each frame is one-of-a-kind, designed and animated by artists here at BUCK and lovingly translated into pine and paint by our friend and collaborator J Bell.
With 48 carvings per ‘animation’, we aimed to make six sequences that would connect our scattered homes and workplaces in space as well as time.
2020 was a heck of a year. Like many others around the world, all of us at BUCK splintered off to our home offices, dandelions to the wind. Despite that separation, as well as all the other challenges 2020 presented, there was still a sense that we are somehow still in this together.
Through the work we create, through our intensely collaborative efforts internally here at BUCK and further abroad with our clients, we have created real lasting bonds. We’re not taking meetings from conference rooms, but our bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens.
We wanted to celebrate those bonds in a simple and hopefully beautiful way.
We opened design submissions up to each of our offices, with a simple brief: togetherness.
Some artists took that brief very... metaphorically (looking at you ‘Slice of Life’), a few went abstract, and others very literal. Each of our offices contributed design submissions which were home-juried, then the winners lovingly animated by representatives of the same staff home room.
Each of the six animations were limited to four second loops, each creating 48 unique frames. Each frame was then output with four unique color palettes... leading to a whole bunch of designs that needed to get cut out and hand painted.
Fabrication
The individual frame designs were each output at scale, hand-carved from pine, then hand painted. J sent the above video at one point with the caption “I did this 284 times”. We’re still not sure if that was an accusation.
Partners in Paint
Through jigsaw and hand painting, our collaborators J Bell and Jennifer Maravillas took all 1,152 of these finished frames of animation and brought them into the real world. Infinite thanks to them, as well as the myriad of BUCK artists involved in this process.
Don’t miss the full credits for each piece below the line!
Series Credits
Executive Producer
Joe Nash
Creative Director
Daniel Oeffinger
Head of Production
Kitty Dillard
Production Coordinator
Dara Ó Cairbre
Jennifer Blackwell
Director of Communications Strategy
Justin Cone
Art Director
Brian Won
Kenesha Sneed
Lucas Brooking
Copywriter
Dave Evans
Series Fabrication
J Bell
Jennifer Maravillas
"Slice of Life"
Design
Carmel Gatchalian
Animation
Gilles Desmadrille
"Lets Work Together"
Design
Joe Brooks
Animation
Dries Van Broeck
"Two Boots"
Design & Animation
Sam Scopellitti
"In Bloom"
Design
Yeojin Shin
Animation
Thea Glad
"Wiggle Worm"
Design
Liz Smith
Animation
Manu Correa Soto
"Dance Floor"
Design
Dries Van Broeck
Animation
Juan Ricardo Hernandez
Branding Credits
Creative Director
Ben Langsfeld
Daniel Oeffinger
Head of Production
Kitty Dillard
Producer
Jamey Kitchens
Production Coordinator
Dara Ó Cairbre
Jennifer Blackwell
Technical Director
Michael Delaney
Creative Technologist
Tayler Johnson
Art Director
Emily Simms
Liron Eldar-Ashkenazi
Design
Trey Holt
Will Burkart
Zuheng Yin
CG Animation
Will Burkart
Zuheng Yin
