Twenty-four questions about Christmas films, and not one of them asks you to name a film. Film crews of the 1930s and 1940s blew a fibrous mineral across the set as snow. What was it? Footsteps in snow are made for the soundtrack by squeezing a bag of what? What do screenwriters call the scene in which the two leads first bump into each other? That is the round: how these films are made and how they are written. Four pages with the answers.
Why nobody has to have seen the film
A name-the-film round splits a room in half. Whoever watched the same few films every December for twenty years clears up, and everybody else sits politely through it. This round does not work that way. No film, character, studio or channel is named anywhere on the sheet, and no question needs you to have watched anything in particular.
What takes the place of the titles is the set of facts sitting underneath the genre, and they are better facts. Crews in the 1930s and 1940s blew asbestos across the set for snow. Cornflakes were painted white and crushed because they crunched properly on a black and white soundtrack. Falling snow was whipped up out of soap flakes. People put their pens down when they hear those read out.
The other half is how the films are written, which anyone who has sat through one in December can have a go at. The scene where the two leads collide has a name. So does the setback near the end that splits the couple up. So does the kind of place the lead always leaves the big city for.
Sound, snow and the look of the thing
A good stretch of the round is about sound, because sound is where a film does the most work and gets noticed the least. The craft of recording everyday noises in a studio and laying them under the picture has a name of its own. Footsteps in snow come out of a bag of cornflour. A fire on the soundtrack is very often somebody slowly crumpling cellophane.
Two instruments do most of the job of making music sound like December, and the round asks about both: the strap of small bells shaken in time, and a keyboard invented in Paris in 1886 that chimes like little bells and has been the stock sound of magic and falling snow ever since.
The rest is pictures. The widescreen process a Christmas musical was shot in before any other film, the one-frame-at-a-time puppet work behind the television specials of the 1960s, filming against a coloured screen so a snowy background can be dropped in later, and the photographer's word for what fairy lights turn into when the lens goes soft.
Twenty-four, or ten inside a longer evening
The question control offers ten, twenty or twenty-four. Twenty-four is the whole round and runs to four pages with the answers behind it, which is a quiz in itself for a small group. Ten is the setting to use when this is one round of several and the rest is coming off the other quiz pages here.
Two of the answers have more than one accepted form, and it is worth saying so before you start rather than halfway through the marking. The bag squeezed for footsteps is cornflour, or cornstarch if that is what your lot call it. Filming against a coloured screen is chroma key, and green screen counts.
If the quiz is attached to an actual film night, print a set of film bingo cards alongside it. Those cards are about the plot furniture on the screen in front of you; this sheet is about everything that happened before any of it got there.
Questions
- Do I need to have seen the films to answer these?
- No, and that is the point of the round. No film, character, studio or channel is named anywhere on the sheet. The questions are about how festive films are made and written, so a room can play it without having watched the same things.
- How many Christmas movie trivia questions are there?
- Twenty-four, which is the whole film round of the quiz bank. The control above the sheet also offers ten and twenty, for when you want a shorter round to drop into a longer quiz.
- Where do the answers print?
- On their own pages after the questions, each answer in bold above the question it belongs to. Set Answer sheet to Questions only and the download is the question pages alone, which is what you want when you are printing a copy per team.
- Is this harder than an ordinary Christmas quiz?
- It is different rather than harder. Nobody can revise for it by watching films, so scores come out closer together than they do on a round that simply rewards whoever has seen the most of them.
- Can children play this round?
- Parts of it. The snow and sound questions are the ones a child tends to get, because they are about everyday things used in odd ways. The writing questions suit somebody who has sat through a few, and under-tens are better served by the children's trivia sheet.