Painting the Winter Blues Away

This time of year it is not uncommon to get a handful of requests for custom drops that need to look like any other season than winter. Not to mention, given the length of the strikes with productions just now starting up, we will probably see even more so this year. Fortunately for us, we foresaw this scenario playing out last autumn when contract negotiations were still going strong.

At the time, I reached out to a couple top grade retouchers I know to see if they could start looking into and experimenting with painting away snow, ice and salt, while also adding in leaves to bare trees and shrubs. We have looked into this in years past, but keeping costs low without giving away the farm on retouching was always a challenge. However, many new softwares have been introduced in the last year that gave us promising results as we waited for Hollywood to turn back on.

Then, finally, on a new Production we worked with last month we were able to put our research to the ultimate test on a custom 20 x 120 foot translight. About four days prior to flying into the location it had snowed 4 or 5 inches and the high for the week was in the negatives. No snow or ice was going to melt away by shoot day. Of course the drop could not have any of this in the final version, so off to an intense 3 days of retouching the file went.

As you can see, we were able to remove nearly all of the snow, ice and salt while also adding back in strips of grass along the sidewalks and mulch at the base of the trees. The production was pleased with our results and the drops are currently on set for filming.

In planning this project, we knew we would not be able to have any snow or ice in the final image, but the conversation of adding leaves did come up as well. I did have my retoucher perform a quick painting in of leaves to a scouting shot we got from locations to give an idea of how it would look. Ultimately deadlines did not allow for us proceed with this aspect of the project, however I am also including our “rough” effort to showcase what we can do when it comes to greening an image.