In the lead up to releasing Courier, we decided that we wanted to get people excited about our new addition by creating a short teaser video. We didn't want give away too much about the app, but at the same time we wanted to reveal some of its features and make the video fun, engaging and well… a little bit Realmac.

Courier's main UI is based on the metaphor of envelopes, stamps and deliveries. So rather than the standard screen-cast-style video of an application going through its motions, we thought that it would be really cool to make Courier come alive using the magic of stop motion. This way we could use some of the real-life elements of Courier to allude to its features without giving too much away.

So we had an idea of what we wanted to show and how we could incorporate everyday elements; such as cotton wool and red jelly beans - to give the video the light-hearted, 'DIY' aesthetic we were after (although to this day, I'm still not quite sure how the plastic horse got involved). The only real hurdle seemed to be that we had never made a stop motion video before!

Thankfully, we had the awesome iStopMotion by Boinx Software to assist us. This is a great app, and it really helped make the whole process a lot easier. Using iStopMotion we could simply set up a static camera and capture each frame as we moved everything slowly around the workspace. Dan and I were on a tight schedule and although we had done a lot of planning, I feared that we may not finish the shoot in time as big changes in light would be a real problem. However, this turned out not to be the case and we managed to finish filming after 6 continuous hours.

Not only did we use iStopMotion to film the teaser video itself, but we also set up a Mac in the corner of the 'Studio' (otherwise known as our meeting room) to record the whole process through the iSight using iStopMotion.

The results of this are almost as fun as the teaser video itself: