The plan for making a storm scene in the desert, in the middle of summer, ran something like this:

1. Make real rain that falls only on Matt.
2. Fill in the rest of the rain in post-production.

Doesn't get much easier than that, huh? Well, first off - we had a hard time figuring out how to make the physical rain. Peter and Andy went to the hardware store about a week before the trip began to find, among other things, the equipment needed to make rain. They had vague ideas of a perforated tray, held above Matt with a siphon hose to keep it filled. Well, first disappointment was that trays 3x4 feet in size are seemingly nonexistent. The second disappointment was the realization that water can't be siphoned upwards unless, either a pump is available or their is a good-size cliff a few feet away. Without a siphon system, the tray would be far too full to be manageable. But luckily Peter and Andy wandered by the watering can section and instantly felt stupid for not having thought of using them sooner.

The water jugs proved themselves during testing, but they worked best by being held up high. They had to be refilled often, so the takes would have to be fairly short. And, of course, the water would have to be carried to the location. They constructed a platform that could be placed between two ladders, borrowed three 5-gallon water jugs to carry the water, and were ready to go.

The shoot went off pretty much without a hitch. Matt got injured, of course, but the water lasted longer than expected and about six shots were managed without having to drive out of the crater to refill.

During shooting, the camera was hand-held and maneuvered freely. No tracking points were placed and no bluescreen was used. This made it easier to shoot, which was, of course, the main concern right then. But this could have made it rough in post-production. At it turned out, though, the plentiful rocks were perfect for tracking on and the bluescreens were a pain to erase.

But this certainly didn't mean that the shots were easy to complete! Here is the process that was used to complete one 3-second shot out of the 6 rains shots. Remember that ever step had to be figured out, because this was the first rain shot, first night shot and first lightning shot completed.

First off, Matt had to be separated from his background. The obvious reason was that rain had to be inserted behind him. In fact, since this was a close up shot, the rain was to be inserted behind him with only the physical rain falling in front. The less obvious reason was that the ground behind him was dry. This was one of the plagues of being short on water - only the spot were Matt was walking got wet, all the rest was nice and dusty-tan. Since the ground behind him was going to have its levels changed, the matte had to fit Matt (matte/Matt jokes were common during shooting) closely or the fringe would be obvious. So keyframes were set for about every 1.5 frames, for the entire 144 frames clip. Normally the ground would be tracked and the data used to help with the matte process, but the shot was too close to Matt to make tracking accurate enough.

By the way, the compositing for this shot was done in Eyeon's DFX. Peter is most familiar with Adobe's After Effects, but DFX seemed good for this purpose and, besides, he wishes to learn it (he has to have bought it for SOME reason).

Then the rain had to be created. This was done in Newtek's Lightwave. About 200,000 particles were created, in two separate scenes, one close up and one distant. The rendering took about 20 hours all together. There has to be a more efficient way of creating relatively simple particle effects, but none was found off-hand. The particle abilities of After Effects don't cut the mustard.

After Effects was used, however, to enhance the rain clips. The clips were smoothly looped and blended to make them twice as wide and last four times longer. A glitter was also added to make the rain look as if it is occasionally flashing in the light of the sun/moon. This was done because, upon careful observation of the footage, it was realized that this is what gives rain its wet look. It's amazing what you notice about real objects when you have to fake them!

One thing to note, all of the effects are being prepared using exclusively uncompressed data. The idea is to keep the quality as high as possible and maximize render speed. The problem is that the files can be huge. The two rain clips of only 10 seconds each, take up over 2 gigs of space. This is mostly because they're about 2000x1400 pixels in size, but still...

Welcome to DFX! Strange interface, huh? The strung-together things in the lower left are a Nodular Flow Chart. Of course, that's why Peter bought this software - because it has things with big names.

The flow chart is basically a graph of how the video footage flows through the controls to the renderer. The footage of Matt and the rain is inputted, mattes and alpha channels are used to cut them up, color and brightness are changed, all the clips are layered, more levels changed, and the finally it is all fed into a render nodule that, when told to, outputs the finished clip to a file.

At this point, the rain (looking like a white rectangle because its alpha channels aren't active yet) is being layered behind Matt. His background is absent here because it isn't put back in until later in the flow. The rain layer is big because it is animated to match the movement of the background. The rain, unlike the matte, was animated with a tracker because great accuracy wasn't needed.

On the left is the original footage, on the right is the completed appearance. Notice the glittering rain falling behind him in the finished composite. Ah... the rain looks so wet!

The day-for-night look was hard to pull off, but Peter thinks that he got a pretty good mix. Real night, filmed through a video camera looks like a stack of black cats. The look of night has to be artificial, but is supposed to look roughly like night looks to the human eye. Cold and desaturated, but not really very dark.

Peter rendered it out and was about to call the scene finished, when he remembered that the storm involves lightning. This shot works work well for a lightning flash, so he went back to the flow and added another levels control. This one was cranked up to wash out the image the way that lightning does - one-sided and very contrasty with almost no color. Here you can see the timeline view with the keyframe controls for the levels in the lower right. The glimpse of the lightning-effect that you can see in the top is all you're going to get for a while. Wait for the trailer!

Incidentally, all of those other keyframes in the middle are some of the matte keyframes... whew! Those took some time!

Peter's going to get back to work on effects. If you haven't seen the rest of the site already, go look around!