‘We’re going to have to make it snow in April’
When you're tasked with crafting a tourism commercial that showcases the allure of a cosy snowy alpine retreat, it’s easy to get excited. The challenge was, the commercial needed to go live prior to the snow season for a Southern Hemisphere winter - in May!
It was the height of Summer.
Between winning the job and its shoot, the weather would only get hotter, and as much as we pleaded, travelling to Europe to catch their snow season wasn’t going to fly with the budget.
We were going to have to shoot this spot, a story that was to showcase the Victorian high country as a place for a winter getaway, in Summer. Summer in Victoria, where the mountains are brown, dry and quite specifically not under two feet of snow.
A snowy winter wonderland?
This was a job with a challenge! The best kind. The solution was in the shooting strategy. We were going to have to lean into the practical and visual effects for this one. But that didn’t mean green screen (there was a bit of that), it means carefully crafting angles and shots that were easy to add effects to. It also means using the cast to convince the audience of what they’re touching and feeling. Plus, it was about lots of planning & choosing angles before the shoot in order to know what effects were required and sticking strictly to the storyboards.
Every angle was locked away before the shoot.
Our approach, (when a shot was outdoors), was to shoot like we would in a studio. Choose a background for the shot, and use layers and layers of wintery foreground and midground effects to sell the desired effect of the scene. Shooting like this, means ‘in one direction’. There is no ‘hey DP, can you just pan left’, because the carefully placed fake snow in the background would give way to 4ft high dry grass!
The location scout found us the backgrounds, and using a combination of photos and storyboarded frames we built our shotlist. Importantly the shotlist couldn’t be added to (without great expense) because of the many layers required for each shot.
Isn’t this magical.
Next was the fake snow and that comes in a few forms. We employed a machine that shot light detergent into the air, creating a snowfall effect that looked astonishingly real on camera. Then there is ‘Instant snow’, a magic powder that fluffs up when exposed to water. This stuff is good for dusting on window sills and sprinkling onto spots where snowflakes get caught like on firewood or brickwork.
Less obvious is Pool Salt, which underfoot looks like icy snow. (You have to be careful with this stuff and place it on plastic first so that you don’t salt the ground). My final and probably favourite is king sized white bedsheets. Throw them or over an out of focus boulder in the background and suddenly it feels 20 degrees colder.
The final result. Not bad. There is one green screen shot in it that relies on visual effects, which I was hesitant to use too much given the degree of difficulty required to sell such an environmental effect. But, I feel that because the shot is a bit dream-like, and the snow behaves in a magical way, the audience would forgive the part of the shot that was born from ones and zeros.
Salty snow.
The lesson to take away from this is that filmmakers are master manipulators. But to trick the audience, we can make them feel cheated. So rather than fooling the audience, we’re better to prevent them from questioning anything else other than what they see on the screen.
Take a look at this image of a young woman enjoying the falling snow. She’s doing 90% of the work in convincing the audience that she’s looking at snow capped mountains. The bed sheet is thrown over the rock in the background and the falling detergent is doing the rest.
Credits: Agency: Leap | Production: Burning House | Producer: Tim Anderson | DP: Wayne Aistrope | Edit: Daniel Kerr.