Making it Snow
Sometimes Mother Nature doesn’t cooperate.
The day of our shoot, we got bright sunny weather instead of the snowy blizzard our scene called for. We were running out of time, and not able to re-schedule the shoot to another day when it possibly might snow. Nor could we afford to rent snow-making equipment. So we went ahead and shot our scene. We shot on the north side of the mountain, so there would be less sunlight to deal with.
Above, you can see the result. Even though it WAS cold, and there was snow on the ground, it didn’t really LOOK cold. Robb Kramer, the director of this shoot, asked me if I could put falling snow in the scene in post production. At first I told him no, but then I thought about it and realized that it could be done pretty easily.
I rendered “snow” particles using Commotion’s included particle rendering system. It’s a very simple 2-D particle system, but I rendered out four different “plates” of particles with different settings applied. I then combined these same four plates again and again in various fashions with the live-action footage.
in some shots, I had to rotoscope people and trees into different layers, so that the snow could go “behind” them. Once the shots were broken into different layers, it was no big deal to remove depth-of-field by blurring the background and/or foreground layers, to bring more attention to the subject of each shot. Color correction was done in Commotion as well, though I fine-tuned it in Final Cut Pro.
Getting the snow to fall at the right speed and appear to be the right size required a lot of experimentation. The end results are far from perfect, but I think they work well enough considering the short amount of time I put into fixing these shots. It’s kind of hard to appreciate the moving particles in still photos, so below is the finished teaser trailer.
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