Lolita - How to Stop a War - Behind the Scenes Pt.2
Post Production, VFX, Matte Painting
Lolita - How To Stop A War (Music Video)
I am thinking back to the moment when shooting this video was complete. I sat watching the footage with major elements disrupting shots, knowing that the next step would be to remove them. That was the plan from the beginning and typically I have a basic idea of how to achieve something before I go all-in. Imagine changing the time of day, and the lighting on a character lit by overcast beach light when you want to create a desert. It can be done, I always tell myself. How difficult can it be? I scheduled 3 months of work on post-production before the release date, so I suppose I had some idea.
Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere were the key programs I used to see the job through. I would take still photos of color schemes I like and use them as a reference. There were several different locations that would have different lighting so I had a large collection of references. Along with those references I utilized miniatures that were photographed from particular angles in front of a green screen that would be composited into the footage. I did the same with footage of clouds and atmosphere. It is amazing how much this footage will do for an image that looks poor. In the opening, I wanted to have enormous robotic snakes that are reaching across the sky; they looked awful. I applied a bit of color correction that matched the footage and I layered a bit of cloud cover overtop. I won't say that these shots are completely believable, but I will say they look better than they did.
I have to say, each shot was just a different batch of problems to solve that would take time to crack. You would have some shots that were very short but required extreme attention to detail to achieve a realistic look. Some shots could take several days that originally were thought to be easy while others were expected to be a pain that was finished after only a few hours. Motion tracking the camera in AE, when the process was successful, allowed me to create 3D parallax of objects from 2D images. I did this a few times in a sequence with a cave. I never truly mastered my depth of field of the 2D images; nevertheless, the shots created the illusion of depth where in the footage there was none. The scene had an altar with candles which was constructed out of foam and sculpted to appear like rock. We shot our actors against this foam sculpture in a small enclosed space where we could control the light. The alter was maybe eight-foot tall and four feet wide. If I kept my actors inside that rectangle then the work in post would require far less frame by frame cutting. Of course, that isn’t what happened and much effort was put in to keep the actors and the cave footage from getting too messy. It was a process.
Looking back at this time, it is good that I spent so much time trying to create environments with 2D images while bringing in practical models. I considered using CG models that could be rotated and altered in post, but I didn’t want to dive into that then. That would be something to learn on a different job.
Douglas LawlorRecalling postproduction for the Lolita - How to Stop a War video, 2019.
