While most of the projects we produce each year are wedding films, once in a while something comes along that’s so incredibly out of our “box” that it’s hard to pass up.  We love a challenge, so when Raymond Rich contacted us looking to create a cinematic music video for his new single “Authentic” we jumped on board.

We decided upon an urban, rustic setting and set out last week to shoot.  As you can see from the screenshot below the sky was rather drab that day.

There’s not a whole lot you can do on location about how the sky looks, but I just wasn’t happy with it.  Maybe we can fix that with a little movie magic.

The first step was to create a series of masks that remove the parts of the frame where the sky appears.  We wanted to leave the bridge intact, so we broke up the sky into four separate pieces.

Here’s a better look at the masks. Note that the two pieces of the mask on the right side beneath the bridge have a different transparency than the others.  This allows us to see bits of the original background – in this instance, buildings and cars driving by.

The final composite.  We inserted a stock image of the sky into the cutouts.

A little color grading and here’s the final shot!

Did this take a long time to do?  Oh yes.  We replaced the sky in nearly every frame it appeared in.

Is this something we had to do?  No, not by a long shot.  The client probably would’ve been fine with the original skies intact.

One of the things we hear most often from our brides and grooms is how impressed they were with our attention to detail.  Quite honestly, we don’t know how to do things any other way.  Sometimes you just look up from your computer at 3 am and realize you’ve been replacing skies all night!  🙂