Inside look at ‘Snowball’
Hey there! Today, we are bringing you the behind the scenes look at the ‘Snowball’ video as promised.
If you haven’t seen the video, please watch this first:
It all began as a little funny idea. We wanted to make this video last year, but since there was a lack snow, we had to wait another year. The first idea was simple – a guy constantly throwing small snowballs on the roof when all of a sudden a large mass of snow falls back on him! But making the effect wasn’t that simple as just dropping some particles on him.
Firstly, in spite of making a great job, our actor Vasek was falling too slow, so we had to do some time remapping. Then we created a virtual floor plane and a null object that was representing the falling snowball and exported the scene to 3DS Max to create a 3D snowball. Although Novotass did his best in 3D Max, something was still missing. When the virtual snowball “landed” on Vasek’s head, we had to make additional particles (about 200 000) in After FX to simulate disintegration of the snowball. Then we added some dynamic shadows, smoke and some other effects to make it as realistic as possible.
But the snowball itself wasn’t the biggest challenge – in the original clip, there was a huge problem: this “beautiful” yellow tree that was unfortunately distracting the attention from our actor – and that’s the last thing that you want to have in your video (if you are not from National Geographic 😀 ) – “starring: a yellow tree”!
So we had to sort it out with something little bit more advanced than just built-in After Effects color correction plug-ins. Luckily we found a great plug-in called ‘Colorista II’ by Red Giant Software! I used Colorista’s keyer to extract specific parts of the shot – that way I could color correct them separately from the others. And BAM! – the ugly yellow tree changed into the nice green tree which blends nicely to the shot. Then I just used the AfterFX roto brush to extract the character and fine tune the edges. It was that simple! 🙂
Actually not that simple… but anyway – hope you enjoy the video and find some of these tips helpful!
Stay tuned for more!
