Topic: A Very Calvin & Hobbes Christmas
In the Howard the Duck commentary everyone side-tracked to talk about a Calvin & Hobbes film. Remember that? Well, Teague and I made a YouTube thing inspired by that conversation. Only instead of an intentionally terrible video we made one we're proud of. We recreated some of the snowman scenes from the comics. Check it, yo.
People have asked how we made it so here are the broad strokes:
First, every shot is practical and each snowman was built from scratch... and it was all filmed on my dining table.
No single method was used. Some snowmen were playdough, some were wire framed sculptures covered in bake-dry clay, and some were papier-mâché. I tried to keep builds consistent within shots though, i.e. only sculpty or only playdough. The snowmonster was a mix of everything. I papier-mâché a wire-frame, used bake-dry clay for the details like eyes and teeth, and then threw all the sugar and flower CVS would sell me on top of it. 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 because it scaled better. Paint the model white and roll it in sugar. Boom. Snowman.
The key to this was patience, a willingness to get my living room very messy (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 but I know Adobe was involved. Always with the Adobe.
Besides the VFX, another key aspect was lighting. And that's a whole thing. At any given moment I'd have between 8-12 lights focused on the set. And dozens of lil' LED flashlights hiding behind models for that coolish-blue backlight.
That's what we did in a nutshell. All the snowmen were practical models that were cleaned, sexied-up, and covered in falling snow by Teague and his fantastic computer device.
Anyway, here's me talking to a lump of sugar at 4am.
Last edited by oTom (2013-10-27 06:16:46)
