Snow Business – It’s that time of year again…Christmas in October!
Well, it is Christmas time for all forms of video content production and TV commercial production. Actually pre-production and even shooting often starts as early as August, so shooting in October is cutting it a little fine. Here we have three stories for Sportsmaster. We asked the question – what do kids wish for at Christmas? Snow of course! Lots and lots and lots of snow. And that’s what we had here in the studio for this greenscreen shoot for Sportsmaster. Great fun!
We didn’t have a huge studio and we had to fit two sets in back to back. This mean building a set where we would employ ‘false perspective’. In other words the set actually becomes smaller as it gets further away from the camera. Since our master shot would be taken from the edge of the set and we didn’t need to have too many pick up shots it meant we could save on space, time and money in terms of the set build. We used the tracks in the snow to give the skiers a route that they could follow in every shot, this meant there was no variation in their rout through the set which again helped save a huge amount of time and also gave more detail and perspective for the shot. Being a white material snow can be tricky to shoot, so the more structure you can give it the better the final results will be.
We also had some fun on the ice. We decided it would be more dynamic and enhance the sense of action if would go the camera down on the ice. So that mean a special camera rig that would allow us to slide the camera around at any speed and in any given direction. It was an extremely simple yet versatile solution and again, was a cheap old school option. We also wanted to have a hero shot so shooting from the low angle with the players looming down over the camera meant we could get the look and also the emotions we wanted to see.
