Phase I
Pre-production
Stichting Flevor, together with Cultuurfonds Almere, launched this project with a clear ambition: to build a professional film production from within Almere, with actors from the city and a creative team rooted in the region. What started as an idea became a full production.
The world of Friends began in a working space in Rotterdam, where art director Melek Bahçe together with Eva de Winter and prop maker Jordi van den Hoek spent months constructing the film's environments entirely by hand. No digital shortcuts: every tree, mountain face, and prop was built, painted or sewn from raw materials. The starting point was an imagined Technicolor film from 1953, how would an Eastern European children's film from that era look if it had actually been made? What would its sets smell like? What would be slightly wrong about it?
Working with a very limited budget, one of the first challenges was finding a large enough space to build the sets over the course of several months. The solution came through propmaker Jordi van den Hoek: Sens2Sea generously sponsored the production with a dedicated workspace in the Rotterdam harbour, where the art department could build, paint and store everything they needed for as long as the work demanded.
Costume designer Ilse Gregoor took on the challenge of clothing an imaginary 1953 Eastern European children's film, one that had never been made and left no reference trail. She researched historical Slavic dress and went in search of period-appropriate wardrobe, sourcing garments that could carry the weight of another era. But one of the most striking visual contributions came from her own hands: Ilse designed and constructed the iconic animal masks and costumes for Bear, Elk, Fox and Rabbit entirely herself, theatrical, slightly unsettling pieces that sit at the crossroads of folk craft and nightmare.
Colour testing was central to pre-production. Cinematographer Roeland Bentvelzen, colourist Robbert Nieuwenhuijs and director Joshua Boon ran extensive camera tests to develop the film's signature RobbertKolor look, an attempt to recreate the particular palette of 1950s Technicolor: supersaturated yet slightly off, joyful yet somehow wrong. The process involved shooting and grading multiple test scenes under tungsten lighting before settling on the precise combination of in-camera and post-production treatment that defines the final image.
When the sets were finally ready, it was quite a logistical undertaking: the largest rental truck we could find was loaded up in Rotterdam and made the journey, décor items, props, costumes and all, to Tungsten Studio near Amsterdam.
Before the shoot, the characters were also rehearsed in Almere together with the actors of Odi Toneel, working through each role so that by the time we arrived on set, everyone knew exactly who they were and how they moved.
Ricardo Sibelo, an actor and dancer with a longstanding career in film and television, joined director Joshua Boon and Natali Munćan to advise on the physical movement of the characters, helping shape the particular way each animal inhabits its body.
"Working with the art department on the Friends project was a dynamic and incredibly rewarding experience. It was a fascinating challenge to align distinct personal styles while embedding hidden narratives into the props, which added so much depth to the final result. From experimenting with 3D printing and foam techniques to build realistic rock formations, to constructing modular, easily transportable trees and tundra landscapes — every day presented a new puzzle to solve. This constant need for creative problem-solving kept us sharp and pushed our imaginations to the limit."
Jordi van den Hoek — Prop Master
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Phase II
The Shoot
Principal photography took place on the coldest weekend of the year, a two-day shoot in a tungsten-lit green screen studio called Tungsten Studio, near Amsterdam. The roads were dangerously icy, and emergency plans and rides had to be arranged to get everyone to the location safely. Against all odds, it worked: the full cast and crew made it, and we shot both days more or less on schedule.
The cast and crew of Odi Toneel, the theatre company from Almere whose actors bring the animal friends to life, worked through temperatures that challenged both equipment and endurance, completing the film's core scenes against a sea of green. The painted sets and props provided the physical texture that would anchor the VFX composites in post.
Marjolein Boom of Marjolein Kookt provided the delicious lunches and evening meals, which the crew could enjoy in the restaurant of Tungsten Studio itself. Producers Benoit and Myriam, together with first assistant director Wouter, kept everything running smoothly between departments via walkie-talkies, coordinating the moving parts of a busy two-day shoot.
The decision to shoot on a Canon C500 Mk II with old lenses (thanks to Cinesupply!) under tungsten lighting was deliberate, warm, slightly harsh, organic. Gaffer Scato Ypma had rigged an extensive array of tungsten lights to guarantee the full, warm studio glow that would give the film its old-world look. Hikmet Kuskal provided a live on-set preview, compositing the backgrounds in real time so the director and DOP could see exactly how the actors sat within the world. The camera moved like a heavy camera, slowly and deliberately, as a 1953 cinematographer might have worked.
"Trying to get back to a look that would hint the audience on a feeling of a certain 1939 Technicolor shot film. Combined with the 'handicap' in this endeavor that we had virtually each shot with chromakey in the background. These two approaches put me on a split in decisions I could or had to make. Getting clean and sharp images, needed for the keying not being a nightmare, made me choose to shoot around F8 and unfiltered. Parts of the background where you can see past the decor are replaced with super colorful scenic backdrops created as matte paintings by our director, Joshua Boon. These matte paintings have such a nice authentic look that it leaves the judgement of the audience in the middle if this really was part of a theatrical backdrop. Things that I could do were lighting with all tungsten lights, going for a 'full frame exposure' and making all the colors pop — not being afraid of going heavy on frontal light. Camera movements during the 1940s Technicolor era had to deal with the heavy camera weight, so pretending we had such a heavy camera was key in how we should limit ourselves. No Steadicam-like shots, only slow dolly or crane moves. In older movies I always notice some wobbly crane or dolly shots — I had the idea to even mimic that wobbliness in some shots."
Roeland Bentvelzen — Director of Photography
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Phase III
Post-production
Post-production on Friends has been a process of layering: the green screen composites, the colour grading, the hand-crafted sound design and the original score were all developed in parallel, each informing the others. Colourist Robbert Nieuwenhuijs completed the final grade that realises the RobbertKolor palette, supersaturated, slightly faded, like a film that has been in a vault for seventy years.
Netherlands Film Academy VFX graduate Victor Frerichs worked meticulously on the green screen removal, placing the actors into the hand-built worlds of Friends frame by frame. Director Joshua Boon contributed the film's colourful matte paintings, the painted backdrops that complete each environment. Together with the work of the art department and camera team, these layers combine to create the artificial, theatrical world that sits at the heart of Friends.
Sound designer Tristan Horton developed a foley approach grounded in the idea that everything heard should feel as though it was recorded in Yugoslavia in the 1950s, aged textures, limited frequency range, the warmth of tape. Almost every footstep, every creak, every ambient sound was created from scratch to serve this framing. Ivo Witteveen recorded the original score with live musicians, alt viola, flute, (bass) flute and harp, in his studio Most.Amsterdam, aiming for an intimacy and imperfection that speaks to the film's handmade soul.
"I was immediately intrigued by the concept of creating a fictional East-European answer to the Wizard of Oz, and Josh's vision on how to approach this. I felt it offered a great opportunity: to start the music with something familiar and comforting and have it unravel into something darker and more modern-sounding as the plot unfolds. Conversations with director Josh, fellow composer Ramon and sound designer Tristan were fruitful and I was happy to feel their support for a not-so-common approach: namely, creating the entire soundtrack by working with a small ensemble of just harp, flute and viola. All music — including the darker, lower and more dissonant sounds — was produced by these three instruments, played by excellent players. The wonderful electronic reprise of the Sarabande opening theme during the end credits, by Ramon, is a deliberate contrast to my acoustic approach, which I think works really well — because at that point, the story takes another turn again."
Ivo Witteveen — Composer
