About Myself

I am Thomas van der Gronde, aged 18, I live in the Netherlands. I got interested in films when I went to The Lord of the Rings when I was 12. I bought the DVD, and after watching the making-of material, I knew for sure that this was going to control the rest of my life!

I am in the last year of high school and I want to go to film school afterwards. At the moment I am in the middle of my film school admissions process, so it’s quite exciting!

Apart from filmmaking I don’t have many other interests. I like to take photographs, but again that’s very related to filmmaking!

I don’t participate in a film club and I am not supported by any professional organisation or whatsoever.

Please see my website to see other films and photography: www.thomasvandergronde.nl

About Lost Fear

Lost Fear is a short fiction film I made when I was 15/16. As a theme of the film I used loneliness, which was slightly autobiographical in that period of my life. In order to enhance the feeling of loneliness, I gave my main character scars from fire on his face.

I chose for the eye as a 'theme' image for the whole film. The film starts with a zoom in to the eye, so the audience gets closer to my main character.

I faced many problems during the making of this film, I needed to find make-up to fake a burned face and I needed to shoot a scene with fire. I called a huge amount of people until I found a makeup woman who wanted to help me without getting paid. I tried to fake fire in editing, but the result didn’t please me, so again I started calling people. At last I found a fireman who wanted to help me with the scene.

I composited the mirror shot in editing, so I shot the scene twice, one part with the real character and the other part with the alterego. I pasted the shot with the alterego into the mirror. The disco scene was a lot of fun to make. Most of it was shot in my (small) garage, hiding the background with smoke. The establishing shots were made in my school. I had put socks under my tripod to make sure I could slide the camera over the floor. It was a very cheap way to do it, but it worked!

The shoot of this 5-minute film was precisely planned; we shot the film in 5 days. This seems to be a ridiculous amount of time for a 5-minute film, but we spent a lot of time on makeup and light.

I shot this film with the Canon MVX20i. Though it was a simple consumer camera, it gave me the opportunity to manually adapt my shutter speed, aperture and gain. In combination with the lighting and colour correction in editing it gave a good result.

About The First Flighthour

The First Flighthour is a short comedy about a clumsy guy who meets a girl for the first time in his life. The title connects with the main character's interest in model airplanes, but it connects with his first experience with a girl as well.

The story is based on funny things I see happening around my school. The actors were theatre actors from my high school. I tried to combine comedy with drama in this film. I was 17 when I made this film.

I did the overall directing and the camera, while there was another director who directed the actors, so I could focus on the cinematography.