With that being said, Snowscape was a simple idea that had come across my mind sometime in mid February. Being in Central Pennsylvania, there was a lot of snow coming down around that time, and I wanted to shoot a film that takes advantage of the seasonal aesthetic. I also knew that my sibling, Loryn Pacheco, was very eager to choreograph some more fight scenes, as it had been a good 6 months since our last live action collaboration on Duel.
Anyway, I came up with a concept that would make heavy use of the beautiful snowy landscapes that our area has to offer. I set aside an entire morning to write out a rough script and send it over to Loryn. Before I even started writing, I had a definite location in mind. Stover's Dam is a wonderful open park only a few miles from our home. As you've probably already noticed, the frozen lake and wooden bridge play an integral part in our imagery at the start of the short. Even while writing I was already imagining the compositions we could capture with the location.
From there, I started working with Loryn on action design. The scenarios had already been written in the script, but it was her responsibility to choreograph the fight scene that follows the "snowball shootout." In the script I described our characters as fighting with Mixed Martial Arts, with my character specializing Jiu-Jitsu/Boxing, and Loryn's character specializing in Jiu-Jitsu/Judo. I catered to her strengths when deciding what fighting styles to include, since her studies were mainly focused on Judo at the time. Anyway, with that information she choreographed a great fight scene that comprises the meat of the film.
With the script and choreography in place, we continued rehearsing the fight until a fresh layer of snow had fallen, at which point we made our trek to the park and began principal photography. Needless to say, the frigid temperatures made production a nightmare. We were appropriately clothed, but the strong winds and the Jiu-jitsu ground-fighting made us numb at regular intervals. Whenever it became too much, we walked back to the car, defrosted ourselves in the heater, and went right back to filming. During the writing phase, the idea was to make the fight ridiculous and messy, with both of us rolling around in the snow as we tussle. Clearly, that idea had come back to bite me, but hopefully it came across well on-screen.
Anyway, we continued filming one day at a time. We utterly refused to shoot on days when the temperature went below freezing, which unfortunately happened more often than not. Sometimes there would be whole weeks between filming for this very reason. We wrapped principal photography in early March and focused on editing and post-production from that point on.
As there were often days of downtime between shoots, I'd already edited much of the footage before we even wrapped. Nonetheless, there was still a lot of work to do.
For the first time, I put a lot of thought into color correction for this project. I was originally considering taking the traditional coloring route of lowering the saturation so I can have greater control. However, I quickly found that this aesthetic didn't match the comical mood we were going for (not to mention, a lower saturation doesn't make too big of a difference when most of the screen is white). So instead I over-saturated the colors with blue shadows and yellow-ish highlights. Of the two pictures above, the one on top has no color correction, and the one on the bottom has the full correction seen in the finished project.
Since we filmed at different times on different days, the lighting would often be drastically different between certain shots. I tried my best to compensate with color correction and gamma adjustment, but ultimately there were still some things that couldn't be fixed in the final product. However, for the average viewer the differences are negligible and would probably come off as a minor continuity errors at most.
The rest of the post-production is pretty self-explanatory. I cut the scenes together, recorded dialogue, put in music, sound effects, foley, Wilhelm screams, etc... I also dedicated a day to animating a quick intro for our production group in Blender, which ultimately turned out pretty "meh" but it serves it's purpose.
On the soundtrack front, I can't say enough good things about Ross Bugden. He's an independent musician who creates royalty free orchestral music on his YouTube channel (linked on his name above). As you can see in the credits, I used quite a few of his tracks in this short, and it's an understatement to say that he provides a valuable service for low-end content creators such as myself. Also, fans of Payday 2 may recognize the music during the fight scene as the track from the Death Wish trailer, composed by the ingenious Simon Viklund. I had a lot of trouble finding music that wouldn't receive a content ID match while also matching the tempo of the fight, but thankfully Viklund's awesome work came to the rescue.
Anyway, that's the story of how Snowscape came to fruition. I hope this provides some insights for those who were curious. The obligatory closing statement is that it was a fun time and a blast to create, but honestly: it was freezing and painful and I hope to never do it again. Thanks for reading!
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