Wagga Wagga Christmas 2016

The Wagga Wagga City Council commissioned Andrew Hagan to create a series of Christmas themed motion graphics leading up to the 2016/2017 New Year. The project aimed to engage the Wagga community through artistic expression of photography, animation and video with a safe and friendly group of people as the central theme. Having created traditional bombastic Northern Hemisphere Christmas imagery of previous years, Andrew presented a subtler take driven by a diverse representation of people in the season of goodwill. In the context of a challenging global politic movement of increasing intolerance, fear, distrust and isolation, it was a great opportunity to showcase that the community can be above such prejudices and fully embrace a wide society of people who define a friendly city. Wagga Christmas 2016 invited as many local people as possible for an 8k panoramic video shoot with a simple yet joyful theme of peace & harmony. This wasn’t technically possible with conventional cameras but the final high-fidelity images were achieved by filming individual groups of people at different times and combining them together in post with high-resolution compositing. With the council’s permission, Andrew co-operated with the library to invite local people to be filmed against a large (digital green) screen for the large group composite over a week. The 5-minute video contains over 150 individual visual effects shots of all ages, sexes, histories and cultures. High-quality 4K compositing created an exclusive projection for the 50m x 8m screen in making the Wagga Christmas 2016 program.