Silent Night is a stop-motion animation about the Christmas truce in WWI. This animation uses a chess set and pieces to retell a warm and touching story in wartime.
Talking about making a stop motion animation, we first decided on using a chess set when we passed by a chess shop in the Greenwich Village. There was a chess store called Chess Forum that sells different kinds of chess. We really like a set of pieces of soldiers so we decided to make a story based on that. We asked the owner if we could borrow them and they kindly agreed.
So, our initial idea was to make a story about a war. We wanted to replicate some scenes from videos or films with different camera shots. Then, it just came mind the truce where German and English soldiers played football on the battlefield. We think this is a good story to tell, and unlike other war stories, it talks about peace in a warm and humorous way.
The Christmas truce (German: Weihnachtsfrieden; French: Trêve de Noël; Dutch: Kerstbestand) was a series of widespread unofficial ceasefires along the Western Front of the First World War around Christmas 1914.The truce occurred five months after hostilities had begun.
The Christmas truce occurred in the fighting as armies ran out of men and munitions and commanders reconsidered their strategies following the stalemate of the Race to the Sea and the indecisive result of the First Battle of Ypres. In the week leading up to 25 December, French, German and British soldiers crossed trenches to exchange seasonal greetings and talk. In some areas, men from both sides ventured into no man's land on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to mingle and exchange food and souvenirs. There were joint burial ceremonies and prisoner swaps, while several meetings ended in carol-singing. Men played games of football with one another, creating one of the most memorable images of the truce. Hostilities continued in some sectors, while in others the sides settled on little more than arrangements to recover bodies.
The following year, a few units arranged ceasefires but the truces were not nearly as widespread as in 1914; this was, in part, due to strongly worded orders from commanders, prohibiting truces. Soldiers were no longer amenable to truce by 1916; the war had become increasingly bitter after the human losses suffered during the battles of 1915.The truces were not unique to the Christmas period and reflected a mood of "live and let live", where infantry close together would stop fighting and fraternise, engaging in conversation or bartering for cigarettes. In some sectors, there were occasional ceasefires to allow soldiers to go between the lines and recover wounded or dead comrades; in others, there was a tacit agreement not to shoot while men rested, exercised or worked in view of the enemy.
The Christmas truces were particularly significant due to the number of men involved and the level of their participation—even in quiet sectors, dozens of men openly congregating in daylight was remarkable—and are often seen as a symbolic moment of peace and humanity amidst one of the most violent conflicts of human history. rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.
We used the Auld Lang Syne as the second part of background music in our rough cut. But our instructor reminds us Auld Lang Syne is not for Christmas Eve, it’s for the New Year. So we changed it into Silent Night.
Created by
Mia Zhang
Ingrid He
Special Thanks to
Chess Forum
Music
Silent Night - Bing Crossby