Happy Holidays, everybody ❤️💚🤍
In 2022, DAF Trucks NV commissioned my previous co-owned studio ‘Matte! Nande?’ to create this Christmas short. They sent it as a holiday greeting to all their relationships.
The challenge for this one was to combine the adventurous, nomadic lifestyle of a truck driver with the emotions of being far from your family at home during the holidays, plus the magical imagery of Christmas.
I’ve always had a lot of love for models, and old Popeye cartoons where they would combine animation with real sets. So for the visual style, there was a big desire to combine physical elements with traditional animation. To convey the feel of a traditional Christmas animation, but also to retain the massive tangibility of a truck. A few days were spent filming and doing stop motion in front of a green screen. Suffice to say, there was no lack of creative play items!
For this animated Christmas greeting, I worked on co-creating the story, writing the script, directing, storyboarding, character design, prop design, animation, clean up, compositing and editing.
Additional credits:
Story, background painting, prop design and prop building: Wijnand Driessen
Music and sound by Robert Jung, who’s composititions made the emotions and adventure all the more convincing.
On the side of DAF we worked closely with Douwe Beckman to develop the short. Thanks, Douwe!
