When goods have been handcrafted with no care for the time and effort but for the love of the piece, it makes sense to ask a stop motion artist to help sing their praises. Very few artisians understand the craft of slow like this class of animator. So when we came across an ad for Scottish luxury brand Strathberry’s Mosaic Nano that illustrated the bag’s creation piece by piece, it just made sense.
The Mosiac Nano is considered an icon in the Strathberry collection, handcrafted using over 60 pattern pieces and carefully assembled using over 900 stitches. Animator Alina Golovlova of SoDaze Studios chose to begin the ad, as well as a second one for Strathberry’s Mini Tote, with the behind-the-scenes small details: the tools of the trade.
“We wanted to show the beauty of the craft itself,” she told us, “the parts that normally stay backstage. A finished campaign shows you the bag; we wanted the stitching, the painting of the leather edges, the small gestures a maker actually does, slowed down frame by frame until they turn hypnotic.
Stop-motion is the one technique that lets you sit inside those tiny movements.”
The two short craft films, “Crafting the Mosaic Nano” and “Crafting the Mini Tote,” were part of a commissioned campaign for Strathberry. “Each film has its own hero,” Golovlova said. “In one, a spool and its thread lead the way–the thread sketches the design, embroiders, lines up the leather and stitches the bag together. In the other, the Patacabra (the leatherworker’s tool) drives it, tapping each piece into place.
“Even the titles are handmade: one is embroidered, the other laid out letter by letter in thread. Everything on screen is the real object; nothing is generated–embroidery thread, the gold hardware, the leather tools (Patacabra, edge-painting wheel, needles) and the finished bags, are all shot frame by frame.
In terms of challenges on set, she told us, “The whole job was animating things that were never built to move. Getting a piece of leather to lift and hold a pose in mid-air took a run of different rigs and pins before one held. To make the thread bend and keep every position, we ran a fine wire through it like a skeleton.
“The embroidery shot was the tricky one. It was stitched by hand off-camera but every stitch left loose, then frame by frame we reached under the fabric with tweezers and pulled each one tighter by a millimeter. There were six days of pre-production, shooting, and post-production for a second and a half on screen. The gold shimmer in one shot was made with beads nudged by hand–this alone took two days straight!”