For this film, Glenn had two elements requiring visual effects work. First, dropping a vacuum off a building, and second, showing that vacuum landing on a mattress but as a video playback element in a studio monitor on set.
For the dropping vacuum sequence, we really couldn’t drop our only vacuum, so thankfully it was a beautiful day. I asked Glenn to string up the vacuum while shooting on the roof, against a clear blue sky. That worked great as a guerrilla bluescreen! Once we had the hanging vacuum element, along with the still plate of the building, I got busy on compositing. The vacuum lifted nicely and using After Effects was able to create a slow-mo look of the object falling to the street below. The source footage of the vacuum even had a nice slow spin to it, which added a nice touch to this sequence.
For the studio monitor shot, I had original footage of our talent dropping an empty mattress and a hi-res still of the vacuum. Breaking the still image into layers in Photoshop, I brought it into AE and animated the vacuum to appear to drop and roll away. This sequence was to be made to look as if it were recorded from the boy’s handicam in the film, so I effected the video to give it that home movie quality, and then distorted the content to fit within the blank studio monitor in the end sequence, to make it look as if they were watching it for real.