At Shilo, we can't help but think of home and family during the holidays. What better way to celebrate than sitting down in front of the TV on a cozy winter night with the gang... except maybe to re-visit an iconic piece of television history and give it a modern twist?

To celebrate the 2013 Holiday Season HBO tapped Shilo to create an animated eCard of a 3D world made entirely of white paper. Inspired by the original HBO introduction from 1983, Director Anthony Furlong began the journey through the paper world with the same apartment. After starting out in the home of a family sitting down to watch HBO together, the camera then flies through New York City, matching the original opening until we pass beyond into the vast landscapes and communities of the USA. Attention to detail was paramount for us as we designed and built every NY building to match the original within this updated style. 

Our research and development phase consisted of building practical houses and characters from paper. From here, we not only had a better understanding of how to realistically model each object in our world, but also which paper weaves could provide the best stand-in for real world materials. To help lend even more of that holiday and handmade feeling the people and animals in each scene were all animated in Flash in a 2D cell style, then brought into 3D in Maya to function like animated paper dolls. The paper world which we created brings a holiday twist indicative of cards, wrapping and a hand-crafted charm; to drive this practical sensibility home we treated everything in this CG world as if it were built and shot in-camera.