CVS “Pull Up”

aka “The Flying Baby”

We knew from the start that this was going to be a VFX-heavy shoot.  We would have to shoot our baby over greenscreen and shoot the backplates of the street ahead of time.  This meant a thorough amount of storyboarding, previs, animatics and location scouting.  We even went so far as to update our animatic with backplates of the location shot with a GoPro taped to the hood of a rental car (see below).

Casting was intense.  We looked at 30+ toddlers in the course of one casting session.  To make sure that our candidates would be comfortable on shoot day, I had the babies audition in a car seat with a couple of lights on them and a fan blowing.  We selected 3 babies, and went so far as to capture all of our greenscreen footage with the primary and backup baby, just in case our primary had a meltdown after lunch.

Our hero baby was magnificent.  What a cutie!  We got all of the elements that we needed and then some. The of the post work was spent retouching "California" out of the background and dealing with the unexpected - between our scout and our shoot one of the houses at our location chopped the top off of all of their trees.