The Christmas season may be over, but the holiday fire is still burning bright over on Tongal. If you’ve been keeping up with all that’s happening in Tongaland, you may have noticed the awesome yule log- themed videos living on our YouTube. And if you haven’t, don't sweat it. We’ve gathered them all in one place for you to enjoy. Even better, we’ve captured some great commentary from the wonderful Creators behind each video.
So whether you’re ready to jump into old traditions or begin new ones, these yule log videos are sure to get you in the holiday mood!
“Sounds of the Beach: The Great Australian Yule Log” by Stephan Robinson (The Brothers Robinson)
We’re big fans of Christmas, so when we saw a Tongal opportunity SPECIFICALLY about Christmas we thought we’d jump at it. Problem is, even though we do have a fireplace available, it was well past using it for Yule logs or any logs. It’s December, and that means Australia’s a bit too hot for burning things.
We came up with our Aussie twist; ice on a beach. What could be more Australian? It’s where a lot of us go over the Christmas and New Year break. And for our friends in the Northern Hemisphere, it could be an hour of something different. A chance to feel warmed by a summer’s day instead of a fire, and to know that the Christmas celebration really is shared all over the world! So we recycled some bottles as log freezers, loaded them up into an esky (what Americans call an ice box, I think) and headed off to one of the many beaches near to us. We picked a comfy spot and there we sat. For over an hour. Watching ice melt. Best day of summer so far! Thanks Tongal! Merry Christmas!
“Storytime with Yorick, the Yule Log” by Noah Miller
Why would you possibly make this? The short answer is that a log burning to death in pain sounded funny. The long answer is that I love the pathetic fallacy, the human tendency to apply human characteristics to inanimate objects (Or as Jeff Winger put it)
It's funny to me how much we can care about things that aren't alive as if they are. So when presented with the prompt to create a yule log video, I immediately thought it would be hilarious if it had the tone and tenor of a child's Christmas video but then suddenly realized it was on fire.
The fireplace was designed in C4D and rendered out in Octane. We wrote a quick script, I did some preliminary voice work in an app called Replica that mimics human voice, and then sent that along with a script over to our longtime collaborator, Tony Mancuso, to give Yorick a voice. Once we had a script back we used an After Effects plugin called talking heads to automatically sync mouth and eye movements to a bunch of pre drawn mouths. It's super quick, so it lets us try a few different versions to get a performance that we thought was funniest.
Lastly, we added some music and there was this nice little swell in the track we chose so I quickly mocked up an opening logo, and added it at the beginning and end.
“Yule Log Murder Mystery” by Michael Peeling
The idea for this came from wanting to take the typical Yule log video, which normally plays as a background, and give it a bit of a story. In film school, I'd watched the 1967 Canadian experimental film 'Wavelength' which consists of a 45 minute push into a photograph on a wall. I reversed that idea so that we'd start on the fire and slowly reveal more and more of the scene as the story is filled out through voicemails. To shoot it we used a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro and a Canon 24-105mm lens and did a slow manual zoom out over most of the 60 minute runtime. In post, I added a bit more range to the zoom by cropping in on the 6K image. I hope viewers enjoy the mystery and have a safe and murder-free holiday!
“Winter Village & The Northern Lights" by Bourdon Collective
When putting this piece together, we wanted to create something that felt like a traditional holiday postcard and meditative video. Once the video gets going though, everything starts to feel a little strange, and a sense of oddness permeates. We’re presented with this scene of an idyllic looking Christmas scene, but there’s no people, only the wilderness and unusual lights in the sky.
We hope people will be hooked by the pleasing visuals we've created, and enjoy the relaxing Holidays-Meets-Strangeness soundscape.
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Note From Tongal: This blog is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the Tongal Blog Open Call Project. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Tongal. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here!
