Maria J Guimaraes

WHO: Globo TV Networks
WHAT FOR: Xuxa's Special Christmas Show
WHEN: 2007
WHAT THEY WANTED: It has become a tradition in brazilian TV the annual Christmas show from Xuxa, the most famous children's TV animator in Brazil and that has been on-air for at least 20 years. It is usually an 40-minute show, where she performs some dramas and musical presentations to tell the children about the Christmas and its values. That year, the theme of the show was about some other world celebrations and festivities that could be compared to Christmas in their meaning and I was invited to design and coordinate all the graphics of the show. The director wanted that show had more animation and graphic elements that live action and provided us a cutout animation video of what he wanted to be our animation referee. So, all the segments that teached about the festivities (about 15 minutes) were voice-over animations where we should provide all the visual elements. We should produce too the opening sequence to the show (except from the show logo) and all the leader to each segment.
Due to some technical difficulties among the production crew, when our team joined the production all the visual reference research was already done by the art department and I had just to put this research into visual reference guidelines for us to design our project.

Extract from the reference animation

Some of the visual references templates designed as guidelines to the voice-over animations

The musical presentations at the show (which would be live action) wouldn't be performed in a TV set as usual, but they would be recorded in a theatre stage. So I decided to bring this reference to our animations, that should look like a 'recorded' puppeter presentation performed in a cutout theatre.

It was a very challenging project. Because of the delays in the production crew, our timeframe was very tight. It took us 5 weeks of work and 13 artists involved, among them illustrators, motion designers and flame artists.

The opening sequence (without the open credits and logo)

Xuxa's Christmas Special Show from Maria Julia Guimaraes on Vimeo.

The 5 cutout voice-over animation videos

Xuxa's Special Christmas Show from Maria Julia Guimaraes on Vimeo.
Illustration by Roberto Campos, Diego Stoliar, Marcelo Papf, André Bethlem and Rafael Vallaperde. 2D animation by Diego Gabrig and Patricia de Faria.