Digital Hyper was hired by Reelworks to take on over 200 vfx shots for “The Ultimate Life Movie”. When we took on this project, I don’t think we quite understood what we were up against. Most of our shots were based on matte painting trees out, rotoscope, tracking and final composite. After working on Trinity Good Heart, Susie’s Hope and Shuffleton’s Barbershop, we thought we’d continue working in the vfx realm. We can easily admit that with the two months we had, not every shot was a success, but we worked hard and fast with a tight budget. There were many challenges in this movie and most of it was removing trees. We had many task such as all the scenes in the open fields, removing current period elements and adding to some shots. Through this process, between just three of us, we gained lots of insight in how we should build our pipelines and how we should budget shots. Stepping back and looking at the project, with as much as we had to do and as tight as the budget was, it was well worth the learning and always a pleasure working with Chris Cates. Chris is one of those guys you just can’t say no to, because he is an awesome person. Overall, the project went well even though we knew a few shots just didn’t hold up. I must admit, hanging out the window of a minivan with an FS100 to get backplates for the train sequence, was not ideal. As a vfx artist, you want to do your best work on every shot, but out of all of them, I’d say that was the hardest one to make work between the keying/roto and intergrating a completely different backplate. To see the trailer, go to www.theultimatelifemovie.com.