The festive ad follows a choir of Christmas gifts on their journey from conveyor belt to under the tree as they sing along to Supertramp’s ‘Give A Little Bit’.

The Mill’s VFX team brought each box to life with animated mouths and over 500 digitally art directed packages.

Mill Creative Director Dan Williams explains, 'It was a fun but very challenging shoot using multiple locations over 10 days. We had a very strong Mill presence on the shoot and an interesting workflow. Because of the compressed schedule, we were still in the R&D phase of the look of the mouth shapes and how they animated and interacted with the boxes, whilst the shoot was in progress.

Having Mill Creative Director Jorge Montiel on-set allowed him to develop the characteristics of the mouths with Nick and the agency and then give immediate feedback to the team in London. 

The spots were being edited by Dan Sherwen at Final Cut on set, so we flew Mill Shoot Supervisor Aran Quinn out from Mill New York to animate and track 2D mouths into shots for the edit as it was being created. His presence gave editorial the flexibility to change shots at will, whilst still being able to see how they would sync with the soundtrack. 

Mill 3D Artists Laurent Giaume split his duties between shoot supervising with myself whilst pre-visualising the main 3D sequences (the plane shots and some of the conveyer belt shots) so that they could be slotted into the edit.

The whole experience was a very positive one for all involved, and having such a strong team on set allowed us to stay on track with the scale and demands of the job.

Mill 2D Lead James Mac explains further, 'Working on Amazon with Nick Gordon has been an amazing experience. Nick’s wealth of knowledge and clear direction ensured the project delivered beyond expectation.

Most of the initial compositing was art directing all the amazon boxes to concise standards. After the 500 odd boxes had been digitally art directed, we set about placing the animated mouths.

Given the number of shots, the focus was on implementing bespoke photo-real composites. The compositing of the mouths was tackled using familiar photographic techniques and transfer layering to maintain the subtle in-camera lighting changes cast across the boxes as they head through the center.'