SHORT FILM

Christmas Miracle

Christmas Miracle was the proof of our ability as a filmmaker and the ticket to higher audiovisual studies.

In my last year of study at the academy, the intention was to bundle all the knowledge gained into a graduation project: The Integral Test.

Behind The Scenes

When the year started, I was actually planning to make 'Injection'. A story set in Austria similar to the James Bond and Mission Impossible films.

Throughout the first months of the school year, this idea started to become less and less possible until November, Austria went into lockdown.

This meant that it became impossible to film there and so I had to find a new plan. It was an option to continue shooting in Belgium, but the increasingly strict rules of covid-19 made it impossible to film this story in Belgium as well.

So I had to come up with a new story, this time with fewer actors, accessible locations and as corona proof as possible.

Mid-November 'Christmas Miracle' came to my mind, soon I started looking for all the necessary elements to make a film.

I was done with this the week before the exams of December. Finally I was ready to shoot, but it didn't seem that easy.

December 26 and 27 were the planned film days, in other words Saturday and Sunday, the weekend after the exams.

On Monday I started to prepare everything, but the first punch came when the news announced that it would rain on Saturday and Sunday. This meant that all outdoor locations had to be adapted to indoor locations. Thus the toy factory was born.

I was also told that the Netherlands was in lock-down and that I wasn't allowed to film there. This location was necessary for the film so I decided to take a risk and do it anyway.

Thursday I was ready. I had all the necessary props, the locations were arranged, the actors were ready and my dream gear was at my home.

Friday, the day before shooting, I was called by a friend, a friend of whom I was allowed to use her house to film there on Saturday. She told me that this could not continue because her parents were afraid of the well-known corona virus.

So soon I had to find a new location to film. Luckily my grandfather had the right house and everything went smoothly.

This time I was really ready, the crew got there on Saturday at ten o'clock and the actors around 15 o'clock.

The time had come, Saturday at ten o'clock I was at the station waiting for the crew, but then I was called. Chris Willemsen, the second lead actor, told me that he couldn't sleep all night. He also told me that he may have corona and that he wouldn't be able to be there on Sunday.

So Saturday I had to find a new actor who could be there on Sunday. My parents, the crew and I were thinking about who could take the part during filming since this was originally supposed to be a small person.

Saturday evening Robin Jonckheere came to mind, he could perfectly take over this role since he already knew the story. When I called him with the news, he surprised me with a positive answer and was prepared to be there on Sunday.

After the shoot, I quickly started working on my favorite scene from the movie, the race against Mr. Mario.

This scene was completely computer animated and required a lot of work. From January 6 to February 25 I worked on this for about ten hours a day, because it had to be ready by the next shooting day.

March 6, I filmed the necessary footage for the computer-animated scene in Rock & Roll Classics with a Fiat 500 Lusso and a Lamborghini Countach.

To animate the cars I used a car rig that made it easier to animate the correct movements according to the physics rules of a car.

Here I had also set commands for when, for example, the car would brake, the rear red brake lights would turn on.

Not only the cars had to be animated but also some small smooth elements like the lucky box of Mario Bros.

For this I had used physics to make the box explode.

The first scene I made of the animation was the street to go to the tunnel. So with this one I had to decide what the style of the entire animation should be.

It's the simplest scene of them all, but it took me a long time time to make because of the amount of choices I had to make here. In the image you can see how the first render of this scene looked like.

Before starting to give everything textures and colors, I experimented with toy cars to see what they would look like if I tried to make them look as realistic as possible.

For this I took pictures of toy cars with elements such as rain that I created from a water spray bottle and red traffic lights with the flashlight of my phone.