College xmas card mini brief

Another nice little live brief I'm working on to design an animated xmss card that will be mailed out from the college. Quiet sophistication is the idea, think Harvey Nicks, not Wilkinsons.

So far I have two possible design directions,

I think they were looking for a animated Gif file but i'm not sure how this will work in practice as they can be a bit clunky, movements are jerky and anything too complex results in a massive file size, but while i'm struggling with gifs I made a flash tester using after effects. Anyway the idea is very simple just falling snowflakes behind some text. 

Click here to see, try to ignore the adverts and white background, on the crapy hosting page. 

http://megaswf.com/simple_serve/75878/

My Second idea is not animated yet, and the design needs more work but its potentially far more interesting if I can nail it. An image made up from bits of a font, and no this isnt looking sophisticated yet but it could with  more work I think.