New Zealand Book Council: Books Come to Life
The New Zealand Book Council approached Colenso BBDO, seeking to reignite public interest in reading. The client wanted to showcase the profound, immersive experience books provide, reminding a broad audience of the unique imaginative journey that literature offers, ultimately encouraging more people to pick up a book.
Creative Idea
A book's text literally transformed into an animated, intricate paper world.
The campaign visually transformed a book's text into a dynamic, intricate paper landscape, literally showing how reading makes stories come alive in the imagination, thereby highlighting the immersive power of literature.
The Hand-Cut Masterpiece That Redefined the Book Trailer
A Twelve Month Labor of Love
While most commercial projects operate on weeks-long timelines, Colenso BBDO and London based Andersen M Studio spent an entire year meticulously crafting the film. The production was a feat of physical engineering; every fern, church, and train car was hand-cut from the pages of an oversized, specially bound edition of Maurice Gee’s novel *Going West*. The siblings Martin and Line Andersen rejected CGI entirely, opting for pure stop-motion animation. The greatest technical hurdle was ensuring the paper models remained physically connected to the specific lines of text they represented, creating a seamless visual metaphor for words manifesting into reality.
From Local Non-Profit to Global Viral Phenomenon
Despite being a local campaign for a New Zealand non-profit, the film achieved a Top 10 position on the global viral video charts shortly after its 2009 launch. It garnered millions of views at a time when social video was still in its infancy, becoming a permanent fixture in design curricula worldwide. The campaign’s "bibliophile-animation" aesthetic was so influential that it served as the direct visual inspiration for the 2011 launch of J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore platform.
The Voice of New Zealand Literature
The film features the voice of Maurice Gee himself, one of the country's most distinguished novelists, reading from his 1992 work. The centerpiece of the animation - a moving train - mimics a famous passage describing a journey between Loomis and Auckland. Executive Creative Director Nick Worthington noted that the goal was to prove that reading is not a passive act, but one where "a world is built in your head." The project effectively elevated the "book trailer" from a low-budget marketing tool to a high-art cinematic form.
Creative Strategy Deconstructed
Company
The New Zealand Book Council credibly delivered on its mission to promote the power of literature and the immersive joy of reading.
Category
Book promotion often relied on static imagery or author endorsements, rarely visualizing the internal, imaginative experience of reading itself.
Customer
Audiences desired to rediscover the immersive, transportive magic of reading, often feeling disconnected from the vivid imaginative worlds books offer.
Culture
In a visually saturated digital age, the campaign resonated by showcasing the unique, active imaginative power inherent in traditional reading.
Company
The New Zealand Book Council credibly delivered on its mission to promote the power of literature and the immersive joy of reading.
Category
Book promotion often relied on static imagery or author endorsements, rarely visualizing the internal, imaginative experience of reading itself.
Strategy:
Make the internal, imaginative experience of engaging with literature externally tangible and irresistibly compelling.
Customer
Audiences desired to rediscover the immersive, transportive magic of reading, often feeling disconnected from the vivid imaginative worlds books offer.
Culture
In a visually saturated digital age, the campaign resonated by showcasing the unique, active imaginative power inherent in traditional reading.
Strategy:
Make the internal, imaginative experience of engaging with literature externally tangible and irresistibly compelling.
Strategy Technique
Dramatize the Invisible Benefit
The campaign took the internal, imaginative experience of reading a book and made it visually tangible. It powerfully illustrated how stories leap off the page into a vivid mental world.
Explore Technique
Creative Technique
Create Fantasy Worlds, People and Things
The campaign meticulously crafted a fantastical, evolving paper world directly from the book's text. This visually demonstrated the rich, imaginative landscapes that reading can conjure in a reader's mind.
Explore Technique
Craft Breakdown
This campaign's craft is exceptional due to its masterful use of paper craft and stop-motion animation, creating a tangible and immersive world directly from the words of a book.
The stop-motion and 3D animation seamlessly bring the paper-cut landscapes and structures to life, transforming the static text into dynamic, evolving scenes that perfectly visualize the narration.
The consistent and imaginative paper-cut aesthetic, coupled with the dramatic shifts in color and lighting, creates a unique and highly engaging visual language that effectively translates the literary journey into a compelling film.
The intricate detail and construction of the miniature paper sets are outstanding, demonstrating meticulous craftsmanship in building entire worlds out of simple book pages and paper cut-outs.
The evocative sound effects—from the rustling pages to the faint train sounds and the crackling of paper—are perfectly synchronized with the visuals, adding an immersive layer to the unfolding narrative.
The true magic of this campaign lies in the harmonious synergy between the precise stop-motion animation, the ingenious paper-cut art direction, and the atmospheric sound design, which together transform the act of reading into a vivid, living experience.
