Visual Effects & Footage Repair
We offer a number of services for repairing problems with footage, including recreating dropped frames, and erasing crew and equipment from shots. Examples of our work include the feature films detailed below, as well as erasing a lavalier mic pack from a long handheld shot in Note to Self, and removing a boom operator and creating the illusion of a shattered window for scenes in TubeLords.
Praying the Hours
Shrieking Tree’s role on this feature film was creating the visual effects for a set of glowing orbs in a pivotal scene and fixing several mistakes in the footage. This included removing microphone wires from actors and erasing crew members from the background of certain shots. The angles were often complex, with the added complication of being handheld, so the solutions needed to be precise. The job was completed in five days in 2021.
Shedding
This feature film about a cat that takes on human form was shot entirely on mobile phones. Shrieking Tree’s role was repairing flaws in several portions of the footage where frames had been dropped by the phones. These included complex sequences such as an actor moving from a sitting to a standing position and walking across a room, where 8-12 sequential frames had been dropped. These were painstakingly recreated so that the footage plays smoothly, leaving viewers with a distraction-free film.
TubeLords
This television pilot created several unique challenges in post-production. In the opening scene, an actor sets himself on fire while bungee jumping from a bridge. The effects of two different visual artists — one specializing in fire and the other specializing in smoke — was combined to achieve the effect. Another scene entailed an actor throwing a laptop through a window, shattering it. This effect was achieved mostly practically — but taping a pane of glass over an open window and throwing the laptop through it — but the staged glass needed to be made to look as though it was integrated as part of the window frame in post. Elsewhere, a sound operator’s boom pole needed to be removed from shots, and a flickering bulb required intensive, frame-by-frame de-strobing.
Note to Self
This short film involved a long, handheld chase shot, in which the main actor ran with the camera operator following him. Unfortunately, his lavalier mic pack was revealed (with its light prominently blinking), and this needed to be removed by retouching hundreds of individual frames.