Last year, Apple worked with one of the world’s greatest living artists, David Hockney, to turn work he’d drawn on an iPad Pro into a gigantic Christmas spectacle, projected onto the wash towers (you and I would call them chimneys) of Battersea Power Station, Apple’s London headquarters. This year, perhaps, the question was asked: how can we follow that?
Apple Battersea, with added Wallace and Gromit.
The result is a spectacular animation featuring Wallace and Gromit, the irreproachably wonderful pair who have starred in TV shows and movies. If you don’t know them, (seriously, who are you?) Wallace is a cheese-loving, hapless inventor and Gromit his long-suffering, loyal and mightily intelligent dog. Really, Google them and watch everything you can—it’s all wonderful stuff.
Also wonderful is the light show that has just gone live at Battersea, which will be on display every day from 5 p.m. to 10.30 p.m. until Dec. 31.
The short movie, like all things Wallace and Gromit, was created by animation studio Aardman, and sees two Christmas trees appear on the wash towers, which are 331 feet or 101 meters tall. The pair decorate the trees together.
The four-minute animation sees two Christmas trees adorning the chimneys, matched perfectly to the height of the washtowers. Each tree is covered with presents, and—fun fact—each gift has a handwritten name on it, corresponding to the names of the animation team’s children. Oh, and there’s one more, addressed to Tim C., whoever he may be. It’s the little things.
Aardman used multiple iPhone 16 Pro Max handsets to shoot Wallace and Gromit.
Aardman used the iPhone 16 Pro Max—eight of them, to be precise—shooting the stop-go animation on the 5x telephoto lens in ProRAW. The images were then assembled frame by frame to create the resulting 6K video.
As Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, Greg Joswiak, said that Aardman’s skill and ingenuity, matched with the iPhone was able “to produce something so joyful.”
In total, the iPhones, mounted on motorized heads to capture two angles of the Christmas trees shot 6,000 frames in total, which by coincidence is about the number of images I take of my dog each week. That’s what it looks like on my Photos feed, anyway.
For the second Christmas season in a row, Apple has done something remarkable to light up the Thames shoreline on the Thames, so I hope it’s now set as an annual tradition.
I don’t like to use the word iconic, but the combination of Battersea Power Station plus Wallace and Gromit make it hard to resist.