Idle Choices by Galdrar, a female-led metal band from Wichita, Kansas, was a very ambitious project that contained a few visual effects that I'm proud that we were able to pull off. We wanted to shoot a levitation scene where Keli, the lead vocalist, seemed to float in the air after conjuring majical spells from the Necronomicon. We brought in an aerial acrobat rig to suspend Keli off the ground. But it was a lot harder to do than planned since it didn't have a pulley system in place - so even a tiny as she is, it took some brute force to get a could seconds of levitation from it. We then moved the rig out of the way so we could shoot a clean plate and composited Keli in the shot without the rig. I then addeded some fire in post to add to the practical fire posts in the background. We were super excited to see that we pulled it off with grace!
During the wallway scene where Keli sees a ghost, we used a black mesh cloth and projected a previously shot clip of Keli in ghostly fashion onto the mesh to create a transparent ghost effect. We could have done this easily in post, but what's the fun in that?
The third effects shot was the tranformation of Kelly when the camera orbits around her in the hallway. We simply marked her position on the floor and switched her makeup and shot two orbiting clips, then blended the two clips when I passed the back of her head.
We had a lot of fun running around the woodsy part of a backyard while Keli axed a dude and munched on another band member's leg.
