So, what do you do when the backdrop for your video shoot is seasonally all wrong? You put the power of visual effects to use. Here’s how we at Waves utilized this power, and created our finished product.
The Pitch
This last fall we were in touch with a new client of ours, Baptist Health of South Florida, about making some videos showcasing their new telemedicine service. We pitched them a handful of ideas, and they picked two for us to continue with. One was “Sick in Bed“, and the other was “Stuck in Traffic“.
The Issue
That last piece brought up some concerns. We were filming this for a hospital in the Miami area, and we were entering a New England winter. Our cast and crew were all set for the two shoots. And we needed to film them both in New England. As a result, it was time to plan for some visual effects. Having just opened up an office in the SoCal region, we knew we would be able to film backgrounds there. So we moved forward with the shoot, with some SoCal visual effects in mind.
The Solution
We set up lanes of cars in a large parking lot and kept the background as even as possible, knowing that we would be removing it later on. (Those large SoCal Hollywood green screen sets sure come in handy…) This is our initial shot:
We piped the exhaust away from our main car (it was something like 25F that day!) and had our actors in place. The shoot went great and our actors did an incredible job. (Not our very attractive crew in the filler cars.) In post-production we cut together an initial assembly and started our SoCal visual effects. We began by cleaning up the shot, and then removing the background:
One of our cam-ops in SoCal went out and got some sunny palm tree shots and we flew those in the background:
After a grade, we ended up with our final shot:
Our client loved it and was happy to see it all came together. It seemed like a tough edit while standing in the 20-something degree cold with the Dunkin coffees in hand. It is a great thing to have clients who trust you and let you do what you know needs to be done. That kind of relationship in work, often yields the best results.
Social:
Check out our Instagram post here to see the process in action:
Final Edit
And last but not least, here is the final edit:
Thanks for checking this out and hit us up in the comments with any thoughts or questions! As always, feel free to contact us for any more information. We’d love to hear from you!