“A Philly Special Christmas Special” turns several of the Philadelphia Eagles (plus one Kansas City Chief) into singing, dancing, spotlight-stealing animated characters who might make you feel nostalgic for old-school holiday cartoons.
The seven-minute stop-motion holiday video, which has racked up almost 600,000 views on YouTube, also features claymation visuals paying homage to aspects of Philly culture, from facades of Italian Market businesses to a holiday trashcan fire. Released on Thanksgiving, the short — “A Philly Special Christmas Special” — is an accompaniment to the holiday record of the same name from Eagles offensive linemen Jason Kelce, Jordan Mailata, and Lane Johnson.
Like many other elements of the players’ (second!) Christmas album, the video was made by and for Philadelphians.
Peter Heacock and Marie Hart of unPOP Animations shot the special in their Mt. Airy garage using puppets created in their basement, all part of a four-and-a-half-month process of turning the video from concept to reality.
“Basically the secret sauce of this whole album, and then this movie, is it’s basically every John Hughes movie where the jock gets together with … the art students,” Heacock said. “So in this analogy, we’re the nerdy art girl hanging out with the big football players. And we’re just super psyched to be in that role.”
With Heacock’s background in film and Hart’s background in crafts and landscape architecture, the couple has run their company for 10 years, specializing in stop-motion animation and often creating content for national brands. They work out of their home, including two bedrooms, the basement, and the garage. (“Our kids have bunk beds,” Hart noted.)
Heacock and Hart had worked with the football team twice before, but never on anything as big as the animated Christmas video. The whole process spanned from mid-summer to the week of Thanksgiving, according to the couple, and involved 5,000 hours of work, 5,000 photographs, and 20 puppets made by hand.
“This is the first time we’ve done anything this long,” Hart said.
‘Made the Eagles happen by sheer force of will’
UnPOP Animations got its start when Heacock began posting content to Vine in 2013, he said, and that led to brands contracting with them to create video ads for social media.
It started with ads for Bud Light’s Lime-a-Rita, Hart said. Since then, unPOP’s portfolio has grown to include work for other big names like Google, Chipotle, and Lego.
They also post fun stop-motion content for entertainment’s sake and have managed to build up a strong social media following, with over 22,000 followers on Instagram, and 304,000 followers and 9.9 million views on TikTok.
The Eagles were always a dream client for Heacock, a longtime fan who grew up in South Jersey. After he’d cold-emailed staff multiple times offering to take on work for the team, Heacock said, someone finally got back to him.
“I really feel like Pete just like made the Eagles happen by sheer force of will,” Hart said. “He was like, ‘I want to make something for the Eagles. I don’t care what.’”
The “what” ended up being promo materials for the team’s “Broad and Pattison” wine collection, which launched in summer 2020. Later on, the team approached Heacock and Hart again to make a stop-motion animated short celebrating Merrill Reese’s anniversary of announcing with the Eagles.
The video was one of the couple’s early forays into using dolls or puppets in their work, and that project ended up setting the studio in a new direction. They were facing a time crunch, so instead of creating Reese’s full body from scratch, Hart said, they attached a clay version of Reese’s head that she’d sculpted to the body of a John Wick action figure.
“When we were done with that project, we took off Merrill Reese’s head and replaced it with John Wick’s head,” Heacock said. “And we made him dance to a song and we posted to Tik Tok, and then that video blew up.”
Soon enough, unPOP was gaining more of an audience on Tik Tok, starting to incorporate more human figurines into its videos, and improving upon its puppet work.
Leaning into ‘make-believe Christmas’
The Christmas special promoting the Eagles’ album put unPOP’s stop-motion puppetry skills to the ultimate test.
“A Philly Special Christmas Special,” produced by Eagles director of player development Connor Barwin and War on Drugs drummer Charlie Hall, dropped on streaming and digital download services earlier this month.
The project marries Philly’s professional sports world with the local music scene, boasting collabs between the players and notable names like Patti LaBelle and Lil Dicky. Kelce’s brother, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, makes an appearance too.
It’s a follow-up to last year’s “A Philly Special Christmas,” which raised over $250,000 for charity. The singing athletes have once again seen success on the charts with this year’s installment, which is also benefiting local nonprofits.
There are some departures from last year, though. The album team decided to think bigger the second year around, from tackling more ambitious songs to pressing more vinyl. They also started selling merch, and doubled down on putting out social and multimedia elements — like the animated special.
The stop-motion video goes along with the whole theme of the album, Barwin told Billy Penn in a September interview. Last year, the teammates had considered doing a surprise live show of songs from the first album, he explained. It ultimately didn’t pan out — but it did inspire the second record’s concept.
“When we thought about doing this record, we thought … we’re gonna do a bunch more songs, but let’s sort of make the record feel like sort of a soundtrack and lean into sort of this make-believe Christmas,” Barwin said. “The idea is, the guys are putting on a Christmas show, or Christmas special, in Philadelphia.”
Originally, the album team had approached unPOP about making an animated music video for one of the songs from the record, according to Hart. But after a call with the album producers, the idea morphed into a pageant-type revue that would feature multiple songs from the album, set on a stage modeled after The Met Philadelphia.
It was bigger than anything that Hart and Heacock had ever worked on, but they were game. Once the partnership was solidified in mid-July, they jumped right into planning and creating the concept, script, figures, and set.
Behind the scenes of a stop-motion special
Figuring how to hone the scope of the project to make it doable was a big theme throughout the process. An initially 12-minute script had to be cut down to seven, and the number of featured characters and settings had to be limited to manage the workload of crafting the dolls and set pieces. (Hart said there are still some unfinished Silver Ages Choir puppet bodies sitting in her basement studio.)
“Creating rules makes better design,” Hart said. “You want parameters that you have to work within. So I said, you know what, we cannot have multiple sets. We have to work very much in the realm of like, not necessarily school play, but more like a concert. You can’t have that many elements on stage.”
Hart and Heacock did their research — which included watching Peanuts and Muppets videos on YouTube and listening to episodes of the Kelce brothers’ podcast “New Heights” — and worked with their friend Steven Joel Murphy to formulate a script.
The album production team offered their feedback on the script, which ended up being solidified within about two and a half weeks. The final product features a Christmas pageant storyline incorporating six of the record’s 11 tracks: “The Christmas Song,” “This Christmas,” “Dominick the Donkey,” “Pretty Paper,” “Fairytale of Philadelphia,” and “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”
The album team had just two requests when it came to the visuals, Hart told Billy Penn: Eagles security chief Dom DiSandro had to make an appearance somewhere, and Lane Johnson wanted his head to look shiny.
A lot of the project happened during a time crunch, and many pieces of the process overlapped — for instance, they started making puppets before the script was finalized, and they began shooting the action before they had finalized the audio (that’s not recommended, Heacock said). The final push to get things done resulted in a 28-hour workday, according to the couple.
“It was kind of like a Muppet Show behind the scenes as well,” Heacock said. “Putting out fires.”
Lots of detail work went into the video: working with a team to make the tiny props and costumes (Hart and Heacock’s children even helped), adding mouth movements in post-production, and capturing the frames for scenes that involved 20 different moving characters, twinkling lights, and a rotating tree topper.
“The thing about putting in a lot of hours on a project … is once you begin to shoot it, you feel the weight of all of the work that everybody’s put in, so you really want it to be a big thing,” Heacock said. “When you present a Christmas special, it’s got to be, you know, fantastic.”
Reception of the special has been largely positive. YouTube comments range from compliments on the nostalgic vibes to heaping praise. (“This needs to be nominated for the best animated short film at the Oscars,” one commenter wrote.)
Hart and Heacock say the positive reception is the best part, from people online to their kid’s teacher and doctor’s office receptionist.
“Philadelphia, thank you,” Hart said.
“You’re so sweet,” Heacock added. “You get a bad rap, but everybody’s been so very sweet.”
