Fire up the particle generators, folks: it’s the time of year when every third commercial features snow and a variation on fairy dust that isn’t usually the product of a visible fairy. Instead, it appears in the wake of a as effects artists do their best to create a visual expression of general-purpose seasonal cheer.  We’ll concentrate on the UK, since that is your correspondent’s responsibility, and explore a few glitter-heavy examples that might not be familiar around the world. Your correspondent’s home island is an odd place for festive advertisements, since it rarely snows in December, and it certainly doesn’t snow very much in the late August weeks during which most of these things are actually shot. Almost all of them, though, reach for the buckets of shredded paper – or the controls for Red Giant’s Particular software. Truly, the festive season is all about floating motes. Let us know in the comments if this is a global phenomenon, and whether it applies to other traditional celebrations, too.

Congealed innards

It’s a sign of the economic times that low-cost UK supermarket chain Aldi is doing so well. Despite the company’s cost controlled approach, though, its yuletide promotional effort gives us two particle effects in the opening shot, setting a high standard for floating glitter in this year’s lineup. Otherwise, Aldi is determinedly traditionalist, giving us a widescreen presentation apparently shot on spherical lenses (the amount of CG integration might have made anamorphics a bit of a millstone). The teal and orange look is a safe choice, especially as it’s so easy to maintain when your protagonist is a carrot.

By comparison, Asda suffers a mild handicap in that its corporate colours are a decidedly antifestive black and green. It’s therefore difficult to depict the logo as a welcoming island of light in a winter scene, although the opening scene is a wonderful example of the slowly-descending crane opener which makes a valiant effort to do just that.

Perhaps by way of compensation, Asda takes a more ambitious approach to camera equipment. There are some striking similarities between the two narratives, both of which feature CG creatures on a military operation, but Asda’s exists in a cinemascope-style frame shot on true anamorphics. If particle-effect snow is done with sufficient enthusiasm, perhaps as a full 3D render, it can be hard to tell from real, but it seems possible that Asda chose to reinforce its dedication to the traditional by deploying real fake snow, if there is such a thing.

Marks & Spencer shows us a world in which Dawn French invites a half the post code round for a pre-festivities party which must have felt crowded even in the multimillion London townhouse in which it appears to take place. The ninety-second piece (a popular duration, for some reason) also gives us a fairy in person, provoking plenty of work for Particular. Even so, the show leans away from the teal and orange toward a look that’s actually fairly desaturated but for the deliberately chosen spot colours of red and green.

The action opens in a world where people are taught to carefully coordinate not only their clothing but also their purchases – look for the red hat, red flowers and red shopping bag from the very first frame. Look also for the interiors which take place in a room that someone’s painted a dark brownish-purple, though the production designer probably used the term “oxblood”. This is a particularly good example of why movies rarely look like the real world, because in the real world people tend to avoid living in an interior the colour of congealed innards.

Gingerbread cannibalism

Dawn’s ersatz house is oxblood and dark green, which is festive but impractical. It would probably look a bit less cheerful around a scene set during a midsummer ball, but it does serve to remind nascent filmmakers that great cinematography can begin with a can of paint.

For those of us who rarely encounter the opportunity to build a dining room bigger than the average UK apartment, consider Tesco, which takes a determinedly real-world approach to its seasonal promotion. Mostly shot handheld, everything seems amazingly realistic until people (and foxes) start turning into gingerbread. There’s a certain body-horror aspect to a gingerbread boy eating a gingerbread video game, but there’s a certainly a preponderance of family values and a standard-issue big, soft, warm top light over a table full of way too much food.

There are even particle effects, though they’re used to create a shower not of fairy dust, but gingerbread cookies, candy canes, and other objects evocative of saturnalia. Again, the photography is fairly straightforward – spherical 16:9 – and beyond the cookie people, the production design is restrained to maintain that real-world feeling. Because sub-f/1 lenses exist, It’s dangerous to claim something was shot on a really big chip, but the depth of field here screams large format. The highly mobile car interior at 0’48” would have needed either a camera ending in “mini” or a DSLR on a stick, but of course that doesn’t preclude a sensor the size of a playing card.

Perhaps the most technically interesting of this year’s crop is the commercial produced by Sainsbury’s. Featuring the BFG character from the film of the same name, the company takes a leaf from Me to You’s now-classic stop motion promo and animates its lead character only every other frame for a handmade look.

Not stop motion

The thing is, the BFG, unlike Tatty Teddy, is computer generated, not stop motion. He’s also inserted into live-action scenes. The combination works surprisingly well, especially considering some of that live action has camera movement. Tracking CG animation at 12.5 frames per second into a live action scene shot at 25 inevitably creates a one-frame disparity in the motion tracking at least every other frame. It is visible when stepping through frame by frame. Still, careful choice of subject and animation creates a result that clearly embodies the sort of hand-made aesthetic they wanted to seem to be using.

It’s a rare moment of innovation in a field which often doesn’t attract many new ideas. So’s the cloud of magical vapour that appears in one scene. Fairy dust is inevitably golden in colour, but Sainsbury’s pushes out the boat with a rainbow of hues. The titular Giant, meanwhile is more or less a celebrity endorsement, and it’s not clear how many of the advertised seasonal treats represents a fair serving for someone who’s thirty-five feet tall.

Finally, there’s upmarket chain Waitrose, which is so famous for producing story-based commercials this time of year that their releases are national news. They hired Matthew Macfadyen. But they didn’t hire anyone with a copy of After Effects to do any particle work, so it’s hard to take seriously.