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After we made “The Thanksgiving Story” we wanted to make a Christmas movie as well. Unfortunately we never got around to making it that year, but in October of 2007 my mother reminded me about it. That’s when I(Kevin) decided I would get started on it and see if I could get it finished in time for Christmas.

Of course I had to make it better than “The Thanksgiving Story”, so I started thinking about how I could make it better. The first thing I thought of was stop-motion animation, where you take a picture, move the people in the shot, take a picture, move the people in the shot, etc. This approach is very time consuming, and since it would be only me working on it (my brother spends most of his time designing cards for GinaK Designs and Stampers Dream) I decided that I would just have to take still photos again.

That’s when the idea of shooting the entire movie with only Playmobil props hit me. When you watch “The Christmas Story” notice how everything in the shot is Playmobil. To accomplish this I ended up using pieces from a wide variety of sets including the mansion, castle, farming, western, and even fairy tale sets. I was also able to shoot the entire movie in color since every prop was a Playmobil piece.

This film was my first film that I really used After Effects with. After assembling my footage together in Premier Pro, and getting a locked edit, I imported the footage into After Effects. I applied the color correction with Stu Machwitz Rebel CC preset. The angel shots where the trickiest, but I managed to get the glow looking right in almost every shot. The part of the editing process that I had the most fun with was getting the night shots to look good. Every night shot you see in the movie was originally well lit just like every other shot in the movie, this is called “shooting day for night”. After I have all the color correction applied to the clips I used Andrew Kramer’s Day for Night Starter to turn them into night shots.

We recorded the audio directly onto a laptop hard drive with Goldwave and edited the audio with Audition. The final product was exported to DVD with Encore.

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