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MillimeterDigital Fantasy Effects
Apr 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Eve and the Fire Horse, a coming-of-age Canadian film directed by Julia Kwan that earned buzz at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, is hardly an effects-oriented picture. In fact, the movie has just 12 digital effects shots, created at Artifex, Vancouver, British Columbia, by a team led by visual effects supervisor Adam Stern. Those 12 shots, however, are crucial to the story, illustrating fantasy sequences that bookend the film in which horses drown and a photoreal digital goldfish sings opera.
“Designing and implementing how the underwater effects would work was challenging,” Stern says. “This is an indie film, so we were concerned about it — there was lots of development work involved. We went to a horse ranch, filming horses running around in front of a [40ft. high, 100ft. wide] greenscreen and capturing them at high speed on 35mm film. We later combined that with some pre-existing underwater plates and 3D work to make it appear the horses were underwater, with lots of detail going into layers, bubbles, particulate matter, and reflections. We got the underwater plates from a project I had previously worked on earlier in the year for the SciFi Channel. We also used ReTimer software [from RealViz] in combination with After Effects to slow the footage down even more and keep the sequences lyrical and flowing.”
