World War Five

We found an ALMOST perfect cave not far from where we lived. While the cave itself was great, we didn’t like the view. But that was okay, because we knew we could change it.

We had scheduled the shoot for a Saturday morning, and we decided to go ahead, even though it was starting to snow. Thankfully, the hike to the cave was short, but the path was slippery with ice from previous snowfalls. Using ropes, we made the final ascent to the cave.

The snow was coming down like crazy at this point, and it looked great. We set up the camera in the cave, and shot a lock-down shot of our three actors entering. We had them mime crawling up over a ledge, as if there was a drop-off immediately outside the cave (which there wasn’t, as you can see in the photo above.)

Knowing that the background was going to be replaced, I exposed the shot so that the backround would be blown out, making it easy to pull a key.

Using Commotion, (a great program created by some guys at ILM that has sadly been left to die by Pinnacle Systems), I touched up the mattes I was pulling using the luminance keyer, and composited in a background of mountains, moving clouds and mist, and several layers of snowflakes, nearly two dozen layers in all. Though it only took me a few hours to rotoscope the actors and set the compositing process up, it took my Apple G4 computer nearly three days to render out the shot! Below you can watch the finished shot:

(Right Click Here to Save) (MP4 - 7.5 MB)

Tags: making movies //