These days, AI can whip up an entire holiday campaign in the time it takes you to find your favorite lip gloss at the bottom of your purse. But we are yearning for some actual making of said magic. The kind that requires human hands, dope imaginations, and a whole lot of patience.
Cosmetics understood the assignment. And then decided to do it the hard way. For e.l.f.’s first-ever stop-motion holiday campaign Made to Stand Out, the beauty powerhouse traded digital shortcuts for handcrafted clay characters, intricate miniature sets, and painstaking frame-by-frame animation.
It’s a nostalgic, delightfully quirky holiday tale that feels refreshingly, well, real. The story follows three besties—Echo, Kit, and Cleo—returning home for the holidays, where old insecurities start bubbling up. But with a little help from their favorite e.l.f. beauty essentials, the trio discovers that the very things they once tried to hide are actually what make them extraordinary.
The campaign was created by Burbank-based indie stop-motion studio Apartment D Films, with cofounder Cami Kwan as the director. In an industry historically dominated by men, Kwan is helping rewrite that narrative. Women make up a whopping 90 percent of the studio’s puppet team and 100 percent of its animation team.
And because no fabulously unconventional holiday story is complete without a little Hollywood pizzazz, enter Emmy- and Tony-winning actor and The Traitors host Alan Cumming. His unmistakable Scottish voice and deliciously camp sensibility bring an extra element of joy to the project—and some giggles (”They ate! We caught up with Alan to ask him about the project and what his greatest difference is and to dish on his favorite e.l.f. products.
It’s really lovely to partner with a brand that you genuinely align with, especially in terms of being vegan and cruelty-free. Obviously, those things are really important to me. The campaign is so authentic and artistic and really the absolute antithesis of where so much of advertising and marketing seems to be going these days.
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