Behind the Scenes

For the last few years, we've made a Christmas video instead of sending out Christmas cards to friends and family. It started because J was frustrated with the lack of creativity in his corporate job, and the fact that our own family wasn't benefiting from his film making talents. We shot in one day over the Thanksgiving weekend and had it ready by December 1st. We received such a positive response that the next year, we did it again.

This year's Christmas video became our most ambitious to date, due mostly to the fact that we wanted to involve both stop motion and photo motion. {In case you are unfamiliar with these terms, stop motion is like animation: you take a photo of something like a candy cane, move it a tiny bit, then take another photo and repeat the process about a bazillion times so that when you show the photos in succession, it appears that the candy cane is moving. Photo motion is similar- it involves showing a rapid succession of photos in order to mimic the movement of video, but does not involve animating inanimate objects.}

Because stop motion in particular is so time consuming, our {typically} one-day shoot turned into a three-day shoot. Luckily, all our sets were in our own home, so we could eat, sleep and distract the kids in relative comfort {check out all the furniture squished into the living room} and around our own schedules.

During the course of filming we took over 6000 photos, animated 200 cotton balls, 72 candy canes, one LARGE bag of skittles and 5 paper cacti.

The skittles were actually purchased to bribe the kids {Stop motion + children under the age of 5 = lots of patience and candy} but when J noticed the red and green ones, he started separating them out. He and E made the them into a tree. They made the 'lights' by carefully moving a single skittle at a time with a piece of gaffers tape stuck to the end of a pencil.

The videos are always a mix of planning and spontaneity. Obviously, the dream sequences were planned. But the jingle bells in L's mouth? Totally spontaneous. We just happened to be rolling while I was fixing the kids ties and that's what he started doing. He also had a thing for falling off of his retro rocket.

Edit: We had planned on painting a photo backdrop but backdrops turned out to be more expensive than we'd thought and not nearly big enough. So I took white acrylic craft paint and painted free-hand on our chocolate wall. More spontaneity! Just an excuse to re-paint in January. :)

As I said, stop motion is a process. We animated the candy canes after putting the younger kids to bed, so Little Miss C was tired and very whiny. It'd be funny if there was audio for all those pictures-- you'd hear us saying such tender, supportive things like, "Suck it up!" and "You just have to lie there, we're doing all the work."

Also funny-- J animated one half of the candy canes while I animated the other, and you can totally tell in the movement of them. When they're raining down, his half is the crooked half. When they're floating up as hearts, his go straight up while mine kind of float around like butterflies. :)

Oh, and we could've used taller ceilings. That tripod is on the countertop with the camera practically scraping the ceiling-- we couldn't even see the viewfinder to check the focus.

In the end, the experience is half the fun. The kids love watching themselves on film and they've become little filmmakers themselves. They've already started presenting ideas for next year!

PS- Mom, the felt beards were tied on with ribbon. The baby had no problem keeping it on, though I wish we'd got a picture of the time he stuck his tongue out through the 'mouth'. Awesome.