You just know times are tough when Santa Claus has to kick the cinder blocks out from under his ride, put some extra feed in the reindeer and fly down to Cleveland to hock some of the old lady's jewelry and candlesticks. And that's exactly what's going on in this spot from the Pavlish Group for Coin & Jewelry Buyers of America. (Don Pavlish dishes after the video.)



According to Don Pavlish, he and film-school buddy Nate Craddock created the spot on a shoestring. He adds:

We wanted a 1970s stop-motion look so we scanned a ton of old vintage fabrics and papers to use as textures. The clouds in the first shot are actual cotton puffs. The colorful sky was created by photographing colored spotlights on my wall. I spent hours hand-tracing a few dozen frames of snow from public-domain 1930s-era animation to composite over the first shot to give it an authentic "hand-drawn" feel. Even the fonts on the North Pole and "Pearl and Ridge" street sign are authentic 1960s era fonts hand-scanned from my collection of vintage advertising art. (And the signs themselves were actually created on paper and then composited into the shot for more authenticity.)

Hey, even if Santa's got to hit the pawn shops this holiday season, no reason he can't do it in style.