Bosch 2024 Advent Calendar

Bosch Power Tools

How do you film Santa Claus in his workshop without traveling to the North Pole—and how do you photograph a product that doesn’t even exist yet at the time of filming? This was precisely the challenge faced by V4—Filmproduktion from Stuttgart—when creating the commercial for the 2024 Bosch Advent Calendar.
Instead of elaborate on-location shoots, V4 opted for hybrid production: The actors were filmed in front of a green screen in the studio, while a virtual film set, rendered in real time, was superimposed in the background in sync with the camera movements. This allowed them to create the festive workshop and an atmospheric living room in just one day of shooting—with a feature-film look, but without expensive set construction and independent of the time of year or time of day. Artificial intelligence was used in post-production to make the virtual backgrounds appear more realistic and evocative, while saving a significant amount of time.
Since the finished Advent calendar was not yet available at the time of production, V4 also created a virtual clone of the product—both for the shoot and for the photo shoot conducted in parallel. In addition to the commercial, V4 was responsible for the entire visual campaign: from the key visual for the Advent calendar’s packaging to the imagery for all other marketing initiatives.