“Glow” continues a tradition begun last year. Brew: A Creative Collaborative, teamed with Twist and volunteers from the entire Minneapolis production community to create a thought-provoking viral film as a holiday message, meant for sharing with clients, friends, and family. Every year we seek to address an important issue, in a balanced, non-partisan manner.
Last year’s film, “Letter”, attracted over 800,000 online views, and was talked about in media and blogs worldwide.
The Making Of
To create this film, director and cinematographer Chris Stocksmith devised an inventive way to use time-lapse photography: a series of still photographs that were combined to create a motion picture effect. The first challenge was finding a vantage point at the site of the former 35W bridge with the Mississippi river in the foreground and the Minneapolis skyline in the background. Because a time-lapse effect was desired, a digital video camera didn’t offer sufficient dynamic range and motion picture film didn’t provide enough detail in the low light. So instead, Stocksmith used a digital SLR still camera, rigged to a device called an intervalometer (which he fashioned from an obsolete Palm Pilot) to shoot one frame every four seconds over a two and a half hour period. Finally, the individual stills were pieced together in Quicktime and handed off to John Shirts, the 3-D digital effects artist. Interestingly, the film you see was originally intended to be a test shot, but conditions were so perfect that the stills were ideally suited for the final film.
Visual effects artist John Shirts took the hundreds of digital still photos from Chris and put them into a 3-D computer system. There were a number of issues that needed to be resolved. The first challenge was that the water movement was distracting due to the time-lapse. There also was considerable foam in the water from the falls upstream, which detracted from the picture. Shirts built a river and added a new foreground in 3-D, after several trials to get the river effect, motion texture and timing correct. He also built the bridge of lights in 3-D, modeling it on the old 35W bridge, based on source photos from multiple angles. He rendered in several pieces, so he could precisely control the reveal of the lights. In the final assembly and clean-up of the piece, he had to remove a chain link fence in the foreground, and in a number of frames he removed birds, planes and other distracting details. Since the stills were shot in late October, there was no snow yet, so he created a snowy feel by digitally painting over the dirt and grass to the far side of the river. He also created the light snowfall that starts after the sunset and added some glow to the city and bridge to enhance the emotion of the film.