One of the perennial bugbears faced by low-budget and independent film-makers is location shooting where there is no control over weather and one is challenged by the variability of available light, This can result in footage that varies considerably in quality, colour palette and shadow, and this is where the craft of the compositor can become a life-saving asset to a production.
Recently we were asked to to re-edit and provide visual effects for a music video for an up and coming London indie band, Rev78. The band had a clear vision for the narrative flow of the video to accompany the first single from their new album, “The Boy in the Blitz”. The single, “Every Bone” has a moody reflective quality and the band and producers wanted visuals to reflect this. The message of the song was that even in the most dire circumstances, with self-belief we can prevail.
The film had been shot on a Canon 7d in the weekend before Christmas 2010, during London’s worst snow for 20 years. There were some very nice scenes and nice performances, but the well-documented issues of the DSLRs were plaguing us as we edited the film together – rolling shutter defects on moving shots, issues with softish focus, not to mention the bane of post production – the very high ISO settings often used by indy camera operators to compensate for poor light (perhaps a post on this in the future…).
As we scanned through the footage, we kept coming back to a key shot – a tilt down from the bell tower of the chapel at the Mill Hill school to Teddy Quick, the lead singer . We decided that this shot could give us our sense of urgency, of impending crisis, if only it was a clock tower! The opening shot would have the hands of the clock moving backwards against a stormy threatening sky.
So, we needed to create a clock tower, and for extra impact, we decided at a critical point of the song, we would explode the clockface .
This is what we had to work with.
And this is what we needed to achieve:
As you can see, we had some work to do.
First, the sky was over exposed and so was a big block of white with no detail. In the video, the camera also tilts down the bell tower from the sky to Teddy Quick. As the camera tilted down, there was a focus pull to Teddy, which meant some sure-footed compositing work when we put a different background in. And finally, where was the clock?!
So how did we transform a fairly ordinary shot of the Mill Hill chapel bell tower to an exploding clock tower?
1. First find your clock.
The clock face was extracted from our stock library. We then animated the clock hands to run backwards. This was then composited in to the bell tower.
2. Remove old sky
The sky in the footage had to be replaced. In order to replace it, we had to first remove the old sky. When these steps had been completed we had this:
3. ’twas a dark and stormy…
A dark and brooding sky was called for, preferably in time lapse. We didn’t have the right timelapse footage in our stock library, so ordinarily we would have gone and collected our own timelapse footage, but the London sky was not cooperating. There was no budget to purchase any stock footage, so there was nothing else to do but to create a sky and animate it.
4. Correcting the light
We now had our time-reversing clock in the clock tower, and our stormy and threatening time lapse clouds so the compositing tools were put aside, and the colourist tools came out. As any compositor, matte painter or visual effects artist will tell you, the two things that sell the illusion we are trying to create is matching light and colour. This is what makes a composite appear like a single image.
With the final composite and colour corrections dealt with, we finished off by applying a warm colour grade to give a slightly moodier feel and then added an animation to complete the sequence.
Then we had time for a nice cup of tea and biscuits while it rendered and was then uploaded.
Here is the finished video for “Every Bone”. We hope you enjoy it!
