South Park - Creative COW Magazine

Pre-production can keep your project on the rails as you balance storytelling
and project design, while staring down the barrel of brutal deadlines
The South Dakota Advertising Federation gave us
a unique opportunity: producing nearly two hours
of animations for use throughout this year’s ADDY
awards program, our regional portion of the world’s
largest advertising competition.
Besides the videos setting up each of the award
presentations, we also created a short visual effects
film for the show open, chronicling a few-second slice
of time where two cowboys catch each other cheating
while playing poker.
As long as we kept to the evening’s western
theme, the SDAF gave us complete creative freedom
— but due to scheduling conflicts, we had less than a
week between principal photography and delivery of
the final edit.
SADDLING UP
To complicate things further, the shoot location was
five hours away from our facility on the other side of
the state. We would not have an opportunity to go
Carl Larsen
St. Cloud, Minnesota USA
back and re-shoot if we overlooked something important
on location.
Therefore, we did as much preproduction as possible.
We had to have a clear understanding of what we
needed to shoot, and maximize our limited time with
the actors on location.
A static storyboard using rough pencil sketches
was a good start, but it didn’t give us any information
about camera moves, or the timing of our shots.
To help with that, we created a motion storyboard, or
“animatic.”
It’s a simple process. We placed the storyboard
frames on a timeline to work with shot lengths. Then
we broke the frames into layers so that we could move
them to reflect changing camera positions.
This was especially helpful as it allowed us to play
with the timing of the shots, simulate camera moves,
and begin working on some of the more complicated
visual effects even before principal photography began.
“I’m a Creative Cow reader — maybe even a junkie,” says Carl. “I pass this
story along as encouragement that great productions can have very humble
beginnings.” Carl recently began his own production company, Telescope
Media Group, and wishes Vision Video “the absolute best in all of
their future projects.”
From top: storyboard with final shot; example of shallow depth of field
We also did several camera tracking tests and
mock shoots in our studio, which proved to be invaluable.
Because we planned to shoot everything overcranked
at 60fps, it was all the more essential to have a
strong understanding of how the edit was going to fit
together before the shoot began.
Thanks to our extensive pre-planning, we knew
the length of each shot, the camera’s perspective and
movement, and even had a music score in place before
we ever rolled camera in Deadwood.
HITTING THE TRAIL
As we went into the project, our goal was to create a
realistic effects film with high production values that
drew attention to the story, and not the effects themselves.
The production involved 2 days of shooting, 5 actors,
2 locations, 14 visual effects shots, and a very limited
budget, using a team of just the 3 of us at Video
Vision: Cody Redmer (previz, editor, lead compositor,
camera/DP, sound design); Dan Bruns (previz, crewing,
location scouting, assistant camera); and me (VFX supervisor,
assistant compositor).
We shot with a Panasonic
HVX-200 in 720p HD mode at
23.976 fps, using a Cinemek
Guerilla-35 depth of field converter
and Nikon f1.8 primes.
The “G35” is an HD 35mm
adapter still under development
as I write this. Its most attractive
feature is that it has a
static imaging plane and does
not require power. As a result,
it’s a simple, lightweight, and
compact unit that is very friendly
to off-speed shooting.
Since ours was a beta model,
one of the biggest challenges
was that it lost a significant
amount of light — I estimate
about 4 stops. (The newest production
versions are said to lose
only 1.4 stops.)
Nevertheless, it afforded
us the ability to mount 35mm
Nikon lenses on our camera.
This provided the beautifully
shallow depth of field and extreme
focus pulls seen throughout
the film.
We also used various camera
support systems, including
a home-made dolly system, and
a 10 foot Advanta-jib with pan
and tilt.
Editing was done in Final
Cut Pro, visual effects were handled
in After Effects, and music
was scored in Reason.
Here are a couple of examples of the way we put
the pieces together to tell our story.
THE RAIN SHOT
The only shot which we had essentially completed before
principal photography turned out to be one of the
most impressive. It appears at the middle of the film,
just after a muzzle flash leaves the audience wondering
which cowboy has just fired his gun.
The camera starts far above a saloon in a heavy
40 September / October 2008 — Creative COW Magazine
Creative COW Magazine — September / October 2008 41