Tedious would be an understatement in describing how grueling this image was to capture. Pre-planning is God when it comes to production, yet it still took my brother and I two months to complete this shot from concept to reality. We knew right away we'd have to make this our money shot in our short film, The Broadcaster, so we decided that wind gusts blowing through the desolate city streets would not only be the sole form of movement in the shot, but also an impressive effect in its own right. We tend to be perfectionists when it comes to this art, so we planned for the effect to be as visually accurate as possible. The location we decided on happened to be an extremely busy part of town; filled with numerous clubs and bars. We knew the only chance of getting the shot we wanted was to wait until after the bars closed at 2 am. At around 3 am, we captured the initial shot from a few blocks down the road.
We decided the wind gust effects would look most impressive against an extreme amount of compression, so we decided on a 300mm lens and shot our subject in 4k from a few blocks down the road. We also panned the camera upwards to capture the upper parts of the buildings for stitching afterwards.
We then captured around 50 images per building to create 3D models from. The quality of the models was actually much higher than we expected. We pieced together all of the models to recreate the entire street and then overlayed it perfectly over our initial shot at an identical 300mm focal length. With all of this 3D data at our disposal, we were able to accurately simulate fog blowing through the streets using a smoke generator. Fog blowing into each crevice through every building would be perfectly simulated, but the amount of smoke needed to be processed would take an entire month to calculate. We waited. We got our smoke data but we still needed to place the lights accurately within the 3D space and remove the texture of the buildings in order to composite the effect over our initial shot. Exporting the city street smoke effect took an extra week to render. That was only the first half of achieving this shot.
We then had to remove the huge building in the background of our initial shot and replace it with a massive radio tower. The idea was that the radio tower would be tall enough to pass through an entire layer of clouds also blowing in the wind. Luckily, we found a free 3D model we could use. We utilized the same smoke generator as before but placed lights underneath it to put it on a different scale the the foreground fog. Once again, we had to wait a week for this to render. After that, we composited the shot of the radio tower onto the rest of the image and added new reflections on the streets below. The only thing left was to add a couple of digital lens flares and color grade the final image. From there, we took snapshots of the shot as it panned up and stitched them together in Photoshop. We added the logo and movie credits and VOILA! You've got a bad ass movie poster.