Topic: A Very Calvin & Hobbes Christmas
You guys remember the Howard the Duck commentary? And the part where everyone side tracked a little to talk about a Calvin & Hobbes film?
Yeah, Teague and I made a YouTube thing about it. It's pretty straight-forward in concept, a recreation of the classic snowman torment scenarios you know and love. So check it, yo:
A few people have been asking how we did it, so here's a thumbnail of the process we went through:
First thing to know is that every shot is practical. Every snowman was built from scratch. And it was all filmed on my dining table.
There was no single method used for anything. Some snowmen were playdough (out of focus snowmen), some were wire frame sculpty models (hero snowmen), paper mache (larger models). We did try to keep clay with clay and mache with mache within shots.
Depending on the size of the shot and model, either sugar, flour, or a 1:4 mix of both was used. The smaller stuff used flour. Paint the model white and roll it in sugar. Boom. Snowman.
The key to this was entirely patience (I haven't done arts and crafts since 2nd grade) and copious amounts of sugar.
Oh, and Teague. Yeah, you need Teague to make this happen, like, at all. This is the raw footage he had to make work:
And
He'll have to 'splain exactly what he did. It's all witchcraft to me. I know Adobe had something to do with it, because of FCP codec headaches.
Aside from the FX sweetness, I know a key component to selling the shots was lighting. And that's a whole thing. But at any given moment I'd have 8-12 lights focused around the table.
Anyway, no one asked for an in-depth-making-of post. Just what we did. Every snowman is a model that got cleaned and sexied by computers.
Hey, look, me talking to a hunk of sugar at 4am...
Last edited by iJim (2011-12-17 10:09:25)
