Sometimes after we’ve filmed a video we realize we’ve missed something or we need one more shot to really tell the story. And sometimes that’s after a huge shoot with lots of moving pieces and scheduling, like horses, armor and a crazy location. So you cant really just pack everything up and head back out to shoot. Sometimes you have to fake a shot and sometimes all you have to use is construction paper.

I’ve always heard the phrase “fake it till you make it”. While that doesn’t hold true in many situations in life it does hold true in this one. We had just finished a huge day long shoot for At The Movies, that included horses, knights, driving off-road down what seemed to be a mountain, lots of moving shots, epic phrases and one 4-wheel drive getting broken. It was a crazy day to say the least. Well when we got back to the office and sat down to edit we realized we were missing a shot that we needed. If you haven’t seen the video then you should know that it is about a robin hood like character (Darian/Red Fox) who is stopping a couple of knights in the forest and demanding money. The video starts with Darian scouting the knights from a distance, but you wouldn’t know he was actually looking at the knights until you see this one shot where they are both in frame. Well…we forgot to get that shot during our daylong shoot. So without it, the video looks like a man walking around in the woods and some knights riding in the woods and then boom they’re together. We didn’t like that and we knew we needed one more shot. So we looked at our footage and planned out a shot we could composite together. Luckily, our Creative Director had captured this shot of the day:

So we used this as the background. Then we found a shot of the knights walking, luckily this shot was locked down on a tripod. Then we masked them out and scaled them down like this:

We overlaid the knights on the picture, added some grain and matched the colors and got this:

Then we needed the red fox. Well, we have the red fox outfit and we have trees so we knew we could shoot something that would fit. So we went down to our Highlands Kids area and found a huge piece of blue construction paper. Yes, like the kind you used to make snowflakes out of in 1st grade. Then we went out back and found a nice tree and then set up this shot:

Normally you would use a green screen for this but look at all that green, I don’t want to have to try to get rid of green in a scene full of green. So that’s why we used the blue construction paper. Another very important step of this is that this shot was locked down on a tripod, just like the shot we are putting this shot into. Also, this isn't even the same guy it's actually Matt Minor, the knight on the right in the video. So in the final version Matt is actually in the frame twice. Anyway, after we grabbed our shot we headed back to the office and with the help of Andrew Kramer’s trusty tutorial removed the blue and placed Darian, er Red Fox, into the scene. Then we added some extra leaves and animated them a little. We got the leaves here. This was our end result:

Also we used that same piece of construction paper to replace a scene from last years Pirate Promo. Here is the original from 2013:

And here is what we replaced it with by using the paper instead of going back to the beach or buying more sand:

Hopefully you can see how easy it is to fake a shot, especially a quick one, that will add a lot to the end project. All you need is a camera and some construction paper. Watch the final result below and stay tuned on the blog and soon I will show you how to make that fake arrow shot!