The Christmas We Make – Suchard 2025

A handcrafted story about taste, time, and tradition

The Challenge

Following the record-breaking success of the 2023–2024 Suchard campaigns, the 2025 brief came with high expectations… The goal was clear: to create a Christmas story that would feel emotionally rich and visually unique - all in record time!

The scale of this production was nothing short of ambitious. Featuring 36 characters, 12.5 distinct sets, and 14 unique scenes! We even produced a mini 2D commercial to play on a television within one of the stop-motion sequences; a small detail that perfectly captured the handcrafted charm at the heart of the film.

This campaign was an opportunity to learn, to experiment, and to reaffirm our commitment to human-centred storytelling in an era increasingly defined by digital speed and automation.

The Approach: A collaboration of Craft

Building on Ogilvy’s original concept, Hogarth took care of the live action production, BOL & Device led direction, and Pangur handled the stop motion execution with meticulous craftsmanship. The collaboration was guided by a clear shared vision, allowing artistry and efficiency to coexist across every stage of production.

A modular character design system, conceived by Device around seven master head models, enabled a diverse cast while maintaining production control. Character design struck a careful balance between cuteness and quirkiness, avoiding clichés while guaranteeing quick emotional readability.

To ensure cultural authenticity, BOL collaborated with Virginia Moriche from the OFFF Sevilla Festival Board & expert in Andalucian culture, incorporating genuine regional details into the characters and sets. This partnership helped ground the story in Spain’s rich cultural diversity, creating a narrative that deeply resonated with Spanish audiences.

The Concept: Crafting emotion through stop motion

At the heart of the campaign is the idea of timeless flavour; the ability to evolve with new generations while preserving the unmistakable taste of Christmas. The flavour of Suchard connects past and present memories, remaining a cherished part of the holiday season. The familiar Suchard jingle serves as an emotional bridge between generations, evoking the warmth of shared traditions across time.

To bring the story to life, the Device team combined stop-motion animation with hand-animated shadows, lighting effects, and painted matte backgrounds. Layers of mixed-media enrich the piece - from live-action sequences in the intro and outro to cel-animated moments in the TV commercial scene, and FX recreating Suchard’s chocolate. The result is a tactile, cinematic world where handcrafted textures and subtle visual rhythms amplify the story’s emotional depth.

The Production: A human-centred production in a digital age

Every element was curated and crafted to feel authentic and relatable. From the carefully built sets featuring early-2000s props - old televisions, lamps, and cozy sofas - to the subtle facial animation crafted frame by frame, each choice reinforced the film’s emotional realism.

Pangur did an outstanding, perfect job. Upon our team’s visit to their studio in Valencia, they were in awe of the intricate, hands-on work and the incredible talent it takes to physically shape a world so full of texture, warmth, and life. The process demanded coordination, precision, and creative problem-solving. What emerged was not only a commercial film, but a celebration of patience, artistry, and the joy of working together toward something significant.

"We were lucky to have incredible pre-production material, which made it easy to achieve a result we are truly satisfied with and that works well on screen. Device/BOL’s work was so thorough that our main challenge was faithfully translating the 2D design universe into a 3D puppet, with its physical limitations.

Everything was so well planned that each phase came with perfect guides, from props to lighting and colour grading. The same applied to the animatic and animation: we aimed to stay as faithful as possible to the pre-production scene planning." - Vicente Mallols, Pangur’s Stop Motion Animation Director

The film’s warmth and imperfection are its greatest strengths; proof that genuine creativity still thrives when it’s made by hand and shared with care.

Lessons & Reflections

The project offered valuable lessons about the balance between ambition and craft. It reaffirmed that despite stop motion’s demanding nature and high cost, it holds its value as an extremely expressive storytelling medium, when guided by clear creative direction, as it clearly depicts the human effort behind it, holding sentimental value. The experience underscored the importance of cultural consultation, showing how authenticity deepens emotional resonance. Additionally, working under tight timelines also reminded the team that constraints can drive creativity when there’s trust and shared vision. Above all, the campaign reinforced that imperfection is what makes stories human, a quality increasingly rare and precious in a world of seamless digital imagery.

For BOL, this project was a reminder of why we tell stories the way we do. Handmade animation connects people not just through images, but through effort, collaboration, and care. This year’s Suchard campaign reaffirms that craftsmanship is not the opposite of innovation, it’s its most enduring form.