A Very Wagga Wagga Giftmas

A 3D-Animated Christmas Event to Remember

In the holiday season of 2023, Visit Wagga planned and held a unique pop-up online event for potential visitors and locals of the region. A Very Wagga Wagga Wagga Giftmas was to be an advent calendar website that people would visit on each of the 12 days of Christmas for a chance to win a special prize contributed by a Wagga Tourism Partner Program member. The prizes were all high quality gifts to encourage the winners to visit the region and engage with local businesses - ranging from $250 dinner vouchers to $800 guided drift boat experiences.

With such a large undertaking and so many appealing prizes, Visit Wagga wanted to make the event really shine with an eye-catching social media presence and an exciting on-page experience for visitors, and so they reached out to me.

I was briefed to create several 3D animated assets - a main feature to be a festive page header, an animated teaser to promote the event across social media and a series of smaller animations promoting each giveaway. The featured page header was planned to be a Christmassy Wagga Wagga scene of Santa, his elves, and reindeer enjoying a river float, with references to other Wagga landmarks and inside jokes for locals to enjoy.

Following a similar process, and re-purposing a few assets from a previous project with the client, I maintained the same visual style to establish a familiar look before I modelled, rigged and animated the remaining 3D assets. For the feature piece, I populated the iconic Wagga beach with a variety of Christmas decorations and local references to give the webpage a real ‘holiday in Wagga Wagga’ feeling.

After the end of the 2023 event, Visit Wagga ran another campaign for 2024 reusing many of the same assets with a few updates and a fresh selection of giveaways, each with a new animation. Both ‘A Very Wagga Wagga Giftmas’ runs were popular with the locals and drew in attention from visitors, with the 2024 event attracting over 1000 entries. The choice of 3D animation provided the team at Visit Wagga with a great deal of freedom to take their event in a creative direction and celebrate the best features of the region.