The “Birds” shoot was a great experience. The director, producer, crew and agency folks were all top-notch and a pleasure to work with. Unfortunately, the weather was not as cooperative as we all had hoped it would be. Every morning was socked with fog that usually lasted into early afternoon – which led to some creative thinking.

 Fog on set 

For one thing, the gliders we composited into the spot were shot against “white screen” (fog) instead of blue sky, as we had hoped. The emu element was shot against green screen (as planned) but they had to set up a “fog barrier” so we wouldn’t have the mist drifting through, thus contaminating the green.

                                                                Glider shot set-up

  Since there were no insane glider pilots available to fly with a 150-pound payload suspended between them, the emu shot was built in the Flame. The biggest challenge was to figure out what a pair of gliders would do! Clearly, they would not behave as normal?gliders do in flight and as there was nothing to reference, it was a matter of best-guess (and trial and error) until we arrived at an animation that worked. In addition to the glider challenge, the emu’s “performance” was singularly uninteresting, so for the composite we needed to animate his legs and head first and as separate elements.      

The emu’s rig 

A couple shots in the spot required air-to-air photography. This was achieved with the Borg (”Resistance is futile”) helmet cam, which was a Photo-Sonics 16mm 1VN camera mounted on Joe Greblo’s helmet (”Glider Joe”). Look at the photo and you’ll see why I felt the Star Trek reference apropos. He did a great job filming while piloting a motorized glider above the subject glider. The other camera you see attached to his helmet is a consumer video camera which was aligned with the film camera and served as the video assist, as the Photo-Sonics had no video tap.
                                                                         Glider Joe

One of the overhead glider shots required additional gliders. These were shot on green screen from above while being suspended from cables. The same rigging setup was used to photograph them from ground level with a second camera (against the “white screen” sky), so we had overhead and profile glider composite elements to use in post.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the RATTLE SNAKE!

- Jake Parker, Visual Effects Supervisor and Flame Artist

Fischer Edit/FX, Minneapolis, Minn.

Washington Lottery’s “Birds” edited by Fischer Edit from Fischer Edit on Vimeo.