Huit Bougies (Eight Candles) was a 13-minute short film my classmates and I created together in 2001 during our time at multimedia school.
© 2001 Alexandre Renevey, Bertrand Petermann & Matyas Kiss
From 1999 to 2003, I studied at a multimedia school in Fribourg, Switzerland. Even though I'm mostly self-taught, I picked up a lot of new skills there. The first year was all about the fundamentals: art history, composition, drawing, colors and shapes. Then, starting in the second year, we finally got access to computers and dove into typography, graphic design, UI design, motion design, web development, 3D, and, of course, video.
For one of our class projects, we split into small teams to create short films. I teamed up with Bertrand Petermann and Matyas Kiss, and together we made Huit Bougies (Eight Candles). We went full horror movie cliché: A guy wakes up in an attic (that's me!), covered in blood, with a corpse lying next to him. Panic sets in. He tries to escape, but the only door is locked. Suddenly, a phone rings inside the attic. A doctor's voice comes through the speaker, but static drowns out the second half of his sentence. And then: flashback!
Fun fact: The shoot took place at my grandparents' house.
Fun fact: Since there were only three of us shooting the film, and the film featured three characters, we had to take turns being in front of and behind the camera. Great fun!
Fun fact: At the beginning of the movie, when I slowly wake up in the attic, the screen is extremely blurry. It only becomes clear once I find my glasses on the floor and puts them on.
What makes Huit Bougies really stand out is its eerie, shifting identities. At certain moments, the physical appearance of the characters changes (the actors switch roles), hinting that an unseen force, perhaps an evil spirit, might be jumping between hosts. Or maybe the main character (or even the audience!) is just losing their mind.
As the movie approaches its end, the main character notices that the dead body has mysteriously vanished. The candles flicker out, plunging the attic into complete darkness. He throws up a strange white substance, then once again heads for the exit - the door that had been forever blocked. This time, it finally opens, and a blinding light floods the scene.
The screen fades completely to white, only to reveal a few seconds later that the guy is still in the attic, lying on the floor, his face emotionless, eyes open, while a haunting lullaby plays in the background. Then, the final words appear: "A utopia is a reality waiting to happen", a quote from Edouard Herriot, leaving the audience with an unsettling sense of "WTF". You can almost hear everyone thinking, "Wait, what did I just watch?"
Fun fact: When I throw up the white substance, it was just yogurt. Holding it in my mouth for that long? Not fun.
Fun fact: Matyas Kiss composed the soundtrack of Meteor Busters, a shooter game I created in 2005.
What made the production really special was how we put it together. While Matyas was editing the visuals, I was creating the soundtrack in almost real-time. Imagine this conversation:
Matyas:
"Alright, first we see a bloody hand, then a white flash. Three seconds of a dead face wrapped in plastic. White flash again. Then, back to the protagonist's horrified expression for four seconds."
Me:
"Got it. Scoring it right now. Go ahead and cut the next part."
We built the whole film that way, meaning the soundtrack was crafted directly to match the visuals, beat for beat. For this project, I produced 20 audio tracks filled with industrial noise, distorted screams, and unsettling, oversaturated sounds. I used Audacity, a free, open-source audio editing software, layering in everything from found noises to soundscapes and industrial hardcore music excerpts to give it that raw, nightmarish atmosphere.
The result? A creepy, chaotic short film with an equally unsettling soundtrack - exactly what we were aiming for. The video, locked in a nostalgic 320x240 resolution, is a bit of a pain to watch nowadays. The soundtrack, however, survives in pristine, lossless WAV files.
If you'd like to get more info about the album, I've created a dedicated page here. Alternatively, you can head directly to Bandcamp, a platform for independent artists to share their music, to grab the album.
Check out some of my other similar projects:
