In every editors life there comes a time where you need a wet, drippy lens. Our time came when editing together a promo spot for San Diego’s NBC affiliate NBC7 San Diego.
In the final shot of this promo we have a snow boarder that throws show up towards the camera and we end on a landscape shot to drop the logo over. When we first cut it together though it was missing something. We needed a wet drippy lens from the snow that was kicked up, and we didn’t have it. The shot that we ended on looked like the one in the image above. Nice, but not what we really wanted.
So what’s the solution? Make a wet drippy lens and add it in post. We set up a shot with a piece of glass hung from a C-Stand and another C-Stand behind it with a sheet of black construction paper. We also wanted to match the sun in the original shot so we used an on camera light to get some highlights on the top part of the glass. From there it was just a matter of rolling the camera and using a spray bottle to mist the glass. We wound up with a piece of video that looked like the above image.
Back in the edit bay it was just a matter of dropping the wet glass shot over the landscape image and then applying an Add composite mode to it. The results were even better than expected.