Family Christmas Photos

For many years now, our family has taken a family photo at Christmas time, to celebrate the holidays and spread some joy. It's also a nice way for us to connect and be creative. Here is a living archive of each year, with some minor BTS commentary.

2017

The very first photo. Thrown together on a whim, when I had the urge to add a little more composition to a family photo. We still took a traditional photo, but it was considerably less interesting.

2019

Yes we skipped a year. It wasn't a regular thing yet. But we came back with a vengeance. We found a creative way to sneak me in there too.

2020

An expected idea since food is such a big part of Christmas, but executed well considering we had to take this photo fast enough so we could still eat the food while it was hot.

From memory, this was actually a composite using two different photos we took. My face was funnier in one photo, but the others weren't optimal, so we merged two photos here to get the best of both worlds.

2021

Not my favourite photo we've done, but a solid idea of us fighting over presents. We didn't have a whole lot of ideas this year, but it worked out.

2022

Two photos technically this year, and quite a fun one. The idea being that Santa sneaking into your house to leave presents could be terrifying. Home invader Santa Claus.

Santa was initially a lot more subtle, and his eyes didn't glow as much, but we found that on mobile (where most people see our photos), people didn't notice Santa at all. Even in this exaggerated/brightened version, people miss him.

And then the second photo is us realising it was just Santa, so we invite him inside for a drink and a good time. Our first (and only?) two-part story photo series.

2023

Quite an ambitious one, with the most amount of post-editing needed so far. The idea being everything going wrong while struggling to prepare Christmas lunch (a fun contrast to the finished lunch photo from 2020).

A lot of set work for this one as well, with all the food laid out (some of it real for our lunch, most of it just clutter to fill space).

The fire on the stove and the burnt/smoking turkey were post effects. The chopped finger was part practical, part Photoshop. The blood was done with tomato sauce on set, and the finger was rotoscoped and moved to the chopping board below (a detail hard to spot, but his dismembered finger is there).

I believe we did this with multiple photos as well. Both to use the best facial performances we could, and to help with Adam's missing finger (one photo with his finger extended, one with it folded down).

2024

Yeah we got carried away...

Definitely the most ambitious and time-consuming idea we've had, but it snowballed from a Christmas song lip sync video, to a fully written, choreographed and edited custom song. Written and produced in a few days, filmed in a single day (it was a long one) and edited over a few more.

We did spend a bit of time planning out the shots, blocking and coming up with creative ideas for each verse/chorus to keep things fresh and add some humour, which definitely helped us get through everything in time.

My favourite shot is probably us all looking serious in our sunglasses around Cherri while she raps. Had that visual idea in my head early on and I'm glad it worked well. It's a nice composition, and gives good music video vibes. Jumping on her at the end was an improvised idea on the day.

My favourite gag might be the time freeze moment on the line "going from stills to motion, we've graduated". It took a bit to get everything lined up and working for that one (again using multiple takes, and some After Effects work, which was a pain considering it crashed constantly).

Ending the video on the final composed "photo" at the end was a nice full-circle way to wrap it all up.

Plus we loved dropping this as a surprise on everyone. Starting the video like we were just taking a photo made it even more of a surprise when it kicks into a full music video.

Really happy with how this one turned out, and it was a lot of fun to make. Don't expect anything as grand in the future though, this was a lot.