LAIKA reached out and wanted to collaborate with me in order to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of ParaNorman. In true spooky fashion they hired me to recreate a scene from the movie in live action which features a ghost dog played by your favorite internet dog, Spence. Today I wanted to walk you through exactly how we made a ParaNorman ghost dog.
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I knew I wanted to shoot Spence separately on green screen to make him transparent and ghost-like and then Bryce, who graciously was doing the special effects, could comp him into the scene we would shoot outside.
First up was testing the shot where Bub first appears. This meant Spence had to run into frame and land a specific mark. Next up was testing the wide shot where Bub jumps through Neil. Now we knew this one was going to be tricky because that’s a lot of action for Spence to do all at once, so we knew we had to divide it up into a few parts.
First we had Spence run into frame and jump onto a chair. Next we had him go around Bryce, just like Bub does with Neil, and we’d stitch these two pieces together in post.
For the outside shots, we found a tree that worked perfect for the first shot. But for the second shot we needed someone to stand in for Neil so I donned some Neil colors and did my best impression. We learned a lot from this test shoot, so armed with the new info we of course did another test shoot.
This time we decided to just test the hardest shot, the wide shot where Bub jumps through Neil. But because Bub is cut in half, we really need to shoot each part of Spence separately so we could get a cleaner and more accurate cut line in our finished comp. So one shot for the front half and one shot for well… the butt half. Which meant every shot had to be done twice.
From the first test we also learned that we needed to break the shot up into even more parts, because we realized we needed to get Spence jumping off the chair as well. So instead of two parts we did three parts. The first part was the same, Spence runs into the scene and jumps on a chair.
But the next part was a little bit more tricky. We needed Spence to jump off the chair and go around it, a trick he hasn’t specifically learned yet so I had to guide him with a treat each time. Then for the final piece we needed Spence to go around me.
This way he’ll start to go around Neil after jumping off the chair and Neil’s legs will create an invisible cut point where we can stitch this third final part in.
After this second test, the only thing left to do was to shoot the actual shot. Luckily we had a couple of tricks up our sleeve to make sure our frame was looking just right. First, we used some of the props from the shooting location next to Spence as a reference to help us out.
For the chair jumping shots, we had another modification. A green screen suit for the chair! This way we could easily key out the chair and not have to rotoscope it out of the shot. Once we finished the chair shots, there was one last shot to get. The bird’s eye view shot.
Now, we knew this shot would be a whole thing so we didn’t do a test shoot for it. And we were right… it was a whole thing. You see, to achieve the bird’s eye view shot on set when we film the human parts, we used a DJI drone. This meant we couldn’t really record all the same camera measurements as we did before such as camera height and distance to subject.
We didn’t have the drone for the shoot with Spence so we had to improvise a little and shoot the green screen outside, putting my camera on my balcony.
Once we had all the shots we needed, Bryce was able to start comping the dog shots with the human shots. And just to add a little spice to the shots, he was able to use element 3D to make Spence's gross inners, complete with a spinal cord. A fun little addition we added that wasn’t in the original shot. Once we had it all comped together, we finally had our ghost dog shots!
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