Another film where nearly all of the work I did can be seen in the first five minutes! The visual effects for this film were some of the most challenging I've done and were nearly all pure compositing challenges. If this were a high budget affair, I'm sure the cow would be fully CG and you'd be reading about all the research that had been done to accurately model the skin and fur texture of the beast. Sadly, this was a low budget production so they needed a more basic solution.

The decision was made to film the cow first as the main plate and then as elements to retime and warp to create the desired action. In this case, the cow needed to reach around and bite off its own udder, something that it couldn't physically do anyway. On a cold night in west Wales, the production team stood in an isolated field and, with a bucket of mollasses handy, tried to coax the cow to turn its head away from camera. We filmed for a good ten minutes before the cow got rather bored and wandered off but I knew we had enough to work with, however fleeting. It's probably best to watch the making-of video to better understand how many elements were used to create the sequence.

All of the work was completed in After Effects, including all the tracking and stablising. The original HDCam footage was often up-rezed to nearly twice its size so that I could tweak every little detail and plenty of denoising and sharpening had to be performed to maintain resolution. If I'd had the RED camera on the shoot, I think I'd have had an easier time of it! The toughest part, however, was probably the retiming of the small snippets of cow movement that was available to try and make a narrative sequence out of it. We only had a few seconds amongst the ten minutes of rushes where the cow turned its head in just the right way so I had to do a lot of stretching and reversing to make it look plausible. In some cases, the same footage was used for both the wide shot and the closeup. Additional blood effects were created by Llyr Williams with a fluids simulation in Realflow.

The other shots in the film were certainly less exciting but still needed a careful eye to get right. There were several sequences where a crow, representing the death of the farm and a dark secret, had to visit one of the characters and generally act in a threatening manner. We used the CG crow from the Pobol Y Cwm titles to creates shadows on the wall as the crow is flying away from the window, scaring the characters. There was also a transition from summer to winter that required a matte painting, rotoscoping of the actor in the scene, and a mixture of live and digital snow. Further effects included adding a church to an otherwise empty landscape and a greenscreen shot of a hillside that was sadly removed from the film (although that may have been the shaky tracking visible on the shot that I annoyingly missed when I was hastily outputting it).

This was a fun project to do, although I missed the chance to see it on the cinema screen as I was away from Cardiff at the time (that said, as it was a Welsh-language production, I wouldn't have been able to understand any of it anyway!) It was a great opportunity to do what I most enjoy: invisible effects that enhance the production without calling attention to themselves. Although I really enjoy doing big, expansive visual effects productions that make extensive use of greenscreen or virtual sets, there's an art to creating invisible effects that provides its own satisfaction.