On the morning of Friday, October 20th we shot all of our plates for our commercial. We have an establishing shot and 3 shots that will have our integration. Shot 1 will have a static camera, a dutch tilt low to the ground that will show the car driving slow by and away from the camera. The second shot is a moving camera that will be following our car from the front. The third and final shot is another static camera showing two cars, one car will be in the frame stopped on the road from the beginning, then the second car will slide into place next to it to emulate the last epic shot of a car commercial.
I brought the fisheye lens and the pano-head on our shot so I could capture the HDRs for all of our shots. We ended up taking three HDRs for the second shot since we were travelling a long distance and weren't sure which portion of the footage to use in our final version.
Abby was able to do some sky replacements on our footage and she also experimented withe replacing the sky in one of our HDRs with another HDR of more cloudy skies. She also graded the rest of the HDR to match the overcast and diffuse lighting when it is cloudy. We realize this will effect our overall lighting when we replace skies and this is our first attempt at trying to deal with that issue. The day we shot our footage was perfectly sunny and the sky was almost completely cloudless. But we realized that it would be difficult to see David's lightning effects when in broad daylight, so a more overcast sky would be more fitting.
The two HDRs below are a side by side comparison of our original HDR from on set with Abby sky replaced and graded version.
The very first day we went location scouting a couple weeks ago, it was very cloudy skies and we have a reference photo of Abby's car in that lighting. We noticed that the lighting is very diffuse and the shadows under the car were basically just ambient occlusion. This is what I was referencing for lighting when we replaced the sky in the HDR and when I made the light rig to start shading the cars.