The School of Visual Arts wanted an animated holiday card for their homepage to span the Christmas/New Year holiday period. Rather than creating an animation based on typical holiday objects such as Christmas trees or menorahs, a simple theme was devised based on the light emanating from such holiday objects.

The animation starts with a camera climbing up the facade of a non-desrcript city building, peering into an apartment with a family illuminated by blinking red and green Christmas lights. The camera continues upward to the next apartment revealing a different family gathering illuminated by nine flickering candle lights. We continue on to find another get-together, this time in an apartment adorned with a radient steel pole (Festivus). Then comes an empty apartment with one barely visible figure standing solemnly in the back corner of his/her dwelling (can't leave out the loners), and finally one last gathering illuminated by seven flickering candle lights, three red, three green, one white (Kwanzaa). Framing the well lit interiors is a cold and grey snowy exterior, with holiday greetings combing forces with snowflakes, adding the contrast of a sterile white foreground to an otherwise richly illuminated background. Eric Satie's Gymnopedies, La 1ere, Lent et douloureux, was folded-in to fill out the mood.

The project was completed in roughly one week using Maya and After Effects.

Happy Holidays!