Plants vs. Zombies 2
This past March I was lucky enough to be asked to shoot the background plates of the official trailer for Plants vs Zombies 2.
PvZ is a popular mobile game (for those who don't know about it) where you play as a gardener of sorts who has the ability to fight off the zombie hordes with various plants you've cultivated (each with their own special skill or power).
Wolf and Crow acted as production company, and their in house animation team Matt Berenty & David Bokser were the directors of the spot. (and are total creative geniuses as you will see in the trailer).
The level of pre-vis on this project was amazing. The spot had already been timed out and rough animated before I even arrived in LA. This meant we could figure out the exact camera moves to do on set, and how long the meat of each shot needed to cover, down to the frame.
We shot on Alexa with Marc Wircioch as 1st AC and Andrew Cho as 2nd. This job presented some challenges for camera dept. and Marc handled them with ease... For example, we needed to be able to always know where our nodal point was at various focal lengths of our Cabrio zoom as well as our 14mm Ultra Prime. We also needed to take copious notes to better help the post team when they were trying to discern how the camera was moving in space relative to where we knew hero animated elements would end up.
Enjoying some righteous iced coffee, post lunch, with Andrew (left) and Marc (right)
Wolf and Crow utilized a robotic wide angle camera to photograph 360 degrees of HDR lighting information in every lighting setup so that the animators would have a very detailed road map of the lighting that was created on set.
Michael Handley (who road tripped out to LA for the shoot with Joe Gallup) gaffed and Cynthia Bystrak was our Key Grip.
It was an honor to be a part of such a fun project and I really enjoyed the collaboration!
Here is a nice link to the final trailer (good quality version of the clip and credits): http://www.wolfandcrow.com/project/plants_vs_zombies_2
And here is the YouTube link:
http://youtu.be/HKJIZ5Qlwhs
Cheers!