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Darby's wing-man Pierre was replicated feather-by-feather in 3D to augment the live action02
Rhys Darby and co-star Sally Hawkins03
Foley, ADR and Baselight grading facilities were used to finish the filmWritten by Nick Ward and directed by Paul Murphy, starring acclaimed comedian and actor Rhys Darby and Golden Globe Award winning British actress Sally Hawkins, Love Birds is a charming, bittersweet romantic comedy about what it is to have friends and find true love.
Charming duck-hero Pierre is a trained New Zealand native Paradise Shelduck, known to Maori as Pūtangitangi, identified by its striking plumage and tendency to form long-term pair bonds.
Digipost collaborated closely with the Love Birds production team to overcome a number of interesting and sometimes entertaining challenges along the way.
The brief ranged from crafting a lifelike animated duck to creating the illusion of a cricket match and producing a convincing hot air balloon - each requiring meticulous design and careful integration with the live action.
The first challenge for the Digipost team was to create a photo-real 3D animated duck to augment the film’s web-footed hero. The process required painstaking photography and feather-by-feather modelling of the animal, which has the longest wingspan of any duck and it flies like a goose. Very little actual close-up footage of these birds in flight exists, increasing the difficulty to accurately reproduce articulated movement of the bird in flight.
Digipost’s 3D department also built the hot air balloon in Maya. Being white, the balloon needed to be particularly sensitive to the environment around it and required careful integration. Much to our enjoyment, the finished balloon looked so good that the film distributors were convinced it was real and asked to buy it for their promotional campaign.
Additional to integrating and lighting each 3D element into the scenes, Digipost’s VFX editors also successfully created the illusion of a cricket game being played on the median strip of a busy motorway. This required the marrying of a number of plates to seamlessly build a scene that places a well-known road next to a natural landmark – a combination that does not exist in real life.
Digipost’s remote Foley stage and in-house ADR facilities were also utilised for the project, and senior colourist Pete Williams graded the film on Baselight FOUR in the facility’s newly reconfigured Christie 2K-equipped theatre.
