Happy holidays! And lots of news!

Hello everyone! Regardless on where you are, what's your reason to celebrate these days, or what are you waiting for, the most, we wish you all happy holidays, a happy new year and all the best!

It's been quite a year, as a team we were throughout the year nip and tack with the schedule with the videos and much much more in the background. Jelle's Marble Runs underwent a series of changes, making the brand better, making the team more efficient and adding new member in.

These might sound boring to some of you but bear with me.. there is a series of juicy news for the next couple of month and you will be the first to know them.

But first I would like to thank all of you for being loyal, helping JMR doing what we do at the highest possible quality providing the best in our abilities. 2023 has been a bit tough, but better compared to 2022, and hopefully worse than 2024! At this moment, I also want to thank everyone in the team, first off Dion for being a huge bro, helping out with filming with SM dissemination and creativity, my dad for keeping the team together! I also want to thank Kars and Jiri for editing the majority of the videos made this year, Minos for the audio and visual art, Greg for the commentary and being the perfect marble voice, Jim our newest JMA member who replied to most of you for the rest half of the year, John, Orbit, the Emperor for being absolute JMA legends, along with the rest of theteam, Jon and Tim who make all the logos you see. Did I forget anyone? Hope I didn't, but if I did I equally thank them for their contribution!

Finally I want to thank all the people who tirelessly make excellent community posts and the moderators as well as all the supporters!

Now to the juicy stuff! As you already know there will be a Christmas race. 32 teams, the 32 ML teams will compete in 4 groups of 8. Top 4 will advance to the semi-finals and then each of the top 4 of the 8 teams participating will go to the final.

Here are some images from the set!

You will see two different versions of the same track. The reason is, we are not only going to make the Christmas video, but also 100 shorts races of elimination! At the first race, there are 32 marbles, one from each of the ML23 and Showdown teams and 2 of these marbles will be eliminated after each 7 races until there are 16 marbles left at race #57.

I also plan to upload a regular video for the main feed, once per week which will be an extended compilation of every 7 races (and 9 races in the final episode). It's not totally decided but this is plan! Now let's get going to the Xmas race.

We used the misty mountains backdrop for this and with the scenery that resembles the background we are going to have a beautiful parallax effect. Objects at the back will be moving more slowly compared to the front. This was Dion's idea and I have to say it looks beautiful in the video!

More scenes from the Xmas village at night.

The video will drop on December 24th, just before Xmas day.

Here you can see me (Jelle) and Dion putting on some marbles for the decoration of the Xmas video!

The Jelle's Marble Runs logo you see there is 3D printed made by us with our brand new 3D printer! Many many of the obstacles from this race are also 3D printed!

It was quite a lot of work and we barely made it in time to film everything but I really enjoyed this one being at the studio with Piet (father), Dion and Jim working on the set.

At the finish line there is the VIP section where you can find your marbles, nearby the choir that will be performing like last year! But with a new Christmas themed song this time!

Marble-Minos will be performing playing the piano with the Marble Orchestra choir singing along with him!

The fire warms the marbles in the snowy landscape.

And this is what it looks like without all the camerawork magic. Do you like it? Let us know in the comments!

P.S. More news will be posted in the coming days! We are onto many things! Keep it rolling!

-Jelle Bakker