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Showing posts with label christmas cards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label christmas cards. Show all posts

Winter Magic. Spellbinding Photographs by Per Breiehagen For Italian Children's Brand Chicco.





I came across these stunning winter landscapes by photographer Per Breiehagen and discovered that they began as a personal project and blossomed into an international ad campaign.




In 2007 Breiehagen photographed his three year old daughter Anja, styled by his wife Lori Evert, as a traditional Nordic elf near his home in Minnesota. The images expertly and magically captured the holiday spirit for his personal Christmas cards.

Several of these images are also available in this lovely children's book, The Christmas Wish.





Encouraged by the feedback, Breiehagen embarked on a much larger project. Born and raised in Norway, his childhood had centered around the fairytales and lore that are rich in Norwegian culture. Stories of elves, trolls and other creatures have inspired his narratives, instilling a sense of magic and mystery in his imagery. “Growing up in a storytelling tradition, these mental images would always be there and certainly influenced my creativity,” he says.





The first round of images went to Getty Images to be used as stock photography. Within a year, the elf girl series had been picked up by agencies in South America, Northern Europe and Asia for a variety of advertising and editorial campaigns, including AT&T. In 2010 ad agency McCann Erickson used the images for Italian baby brand Chicco's holiday campaign.




This year, Breiehagen has worked again with McCann Erickson to shoot his daughter Anja in an exclusive set of images for the 2011 Chicco brand holiday campaign, making the sweet little elf in the red cap the icon for the brand.


above: One of the images as used on Chicco's website.

The images can be seen on billboards, on television, in print and on their web site throughout this holiday season.














Breiehagen and wife Evert are now actively on the hunt for a publisher to create a Christmas book featuring these images. Anja is getting older but Breiehagen hopes her legacy as the little elf girl will continue to represent a timeless holiday spirit.

I have chosen my favorites from his Winter Magic Series to place in this post, to see all the shots, visit Per Breiehagen's site.

To learn more about the props, styling and digital compositing for these beautiful images, read Jacqui Palumbo's detailed article on this project for PDN, here.

all images courtesy of Per Breiehagen

Crack Up At The Crandall Family Christmas Cards.



above: In 2005, the Crandall family sent out their own version of the childrens' book, Pat The Bunny

Meet a family whose yearly Christmas Cards are way better than yours. Not only are these people better looking than your family, but they are far more clever, too. Before you scoff and think to yourself "Well, you haven't seen our family Christmas cards," I don't have to. Read the post and you'll see that I'm right.

Court Crandall is a talented creative director, screenwriter, author, father and beer league hockey player and someone I worked with too many years ago to put in print.

Each year Court, along with his equal parts stunning and smart wife Denise and their two handsome sons who don soap opera hunk names Chase and Zane, poke fun of themselves in their annual holiday cards. Nothing and no one is sacred as they mock everything from menopause to puberty to the Yankees. What a nice and welcome change from the family Christmas cards that take themselves seriously or worse, pretentiously. The fact that they come from this disgustingly good looking, trim and tanned family makes one like them even more.


above: Court and Denise at their 1992 nuptials

I wouldn't dare attempt to re-word Court's award winning prose, so I will simply reproduce his blog post here for you with the images of their family Christmas cards for the past 17 years so you can enjoy these hilarious annual greetings from the Crandall Family. Perhaps these will inspire you to move away from matching sweaters and frozen smiles in your next family Christmas card.

The text below is taken directly from the blog Holding Court and is written in the first person voice of Court Crandall:

This is probably the longest running campaign I’ve ever been a part of. It started just after my wife, Denise, and I got married in 1992. I had been in California for two years and wanted a way to punk my friends back in Boston. So, for our first Christmas together, we sent out a holiday card that showed us rollerblading our tree home. (Something we actually did by the way, because I was driving a, um, Miata. Trust me, it was super cool back then. Super.)



As we got older, life graciously provided us with a number of props: A new house, two children, a cat, a dog and a fake nanny to name a few. Sometimes these accessories worked. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they needed to use the litter box in the middle of the shoot. Regardless, there have always been plenty of stories that went along with the shooting of the annual Christmas card. Most of which involve one or both boys misbehaving, my wife getting frustrated to the point of tears and all of us riding home in silence. Typically, to some song on the car radio like “We are Family” that accentuated what a disappointment we are as a family unit.

Then there’s the fulfillment process, which Denise runs like a Nike factory in rural Malaysia. Each family member gets a pile of envelopes, a stack of labels and whatever saliva you can muster to seal roughly … nine hundred thousand invitations. You see, due to the card’s increased popularity over the years, numerous people have requested to be added to the mailing list — a list that now includes family members, friends, folks I know but don’t particularly care for, complete strangers and the guy who owns the Indian restaurant down the street.

That said, with time, our sons have come to not only endure but embrace the annual Christmas card tradition. And they’ve learned that, while humiliating, being dressed in togas, having fake pubic hair applied to their face and Hershey’s chocolate coagulating in their ears, are small prices to pay for getting attention from chicks at school a week later.

There are 18 years of cards in all. While I like some more than others, the thing I’m most proud of, is that all four of the people who are featured throughout are healthy, we’re all still together and not a day goes by that we don’t share at least one really good laugh.

2010:


I hope you enjoy the latest submission (shown above). I hope you have a great holiday with the folks you love most. And I hope that with time, the chocolate smell in my wife’s car will dissipate.

Previous Crandall Family Christmas Cards:

2009:

2008:

2007:

2006:

2005:






2004:

2003:

2002:

2001:

2000:

1999:

1998:

1997:

1996:

1995:

1994:

1993:

all images reproduced with permission from the Crandall Family

I look forward to their cards to come and I bet you do now, too.

Merry Christmas!

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