crow in a ruin
Had a little skip week there – I’ve been moving house so things have been a touch hectic lately. Regardless, we’ve had some productive times in the studio, picking up lots of miscellaneous shots that don’t involve our main characters.
Because I missed a week, here’s a treat – a snippet of animation exported straight from the rig!
There’s filmmaking term ‘cat in a window shot’, meaning a simple cut away shot, I guess traditionally of a cat sitting in a window, something that can be used in the edit to cut in between any two other shots, to help cover awkward edits. Anyway, on our film we have a ‘crow in a ruin’ shot instead. This is a little piece of atmosphere that will help cut together the build up to one of our pivotal scenes.
brewing up a storm
Crows aside, we’ve mostly been concentrated on perfecting our cloud techniques, and shot a fantastic assortment of storm clouds and lightning in various degrees of thunderousness. Our cloud effects are created by painting giant 3 x 5 foot cloud elements on a mix of different paper stocks and transparency. These are then layered together on the rig, lit with mix of light box from below and a couple of key lights, and animated at different speeds to create the illusion of shifting three dimensional clouds. The rougher and messier they look, the better the final effect seems to be!
this cloudscape is no where near messy enough
Next week we’re back with our protagonists, capturing them in a reflective fireside moment. Now we’ve just gotta figure out how to make campfires…