Our Kind of Traitor
A helicopter’s fate played out in almost balletic fashion through a beautifully composed frame.
The director wanted to build the sequence slowly. The shots are played out from the main character’s POV and this forces the audience to observe in horror. I hoped to capture the grace of a falling sycamore leaf.
The visualisation I created was used to help Ewan project a genuine bewilderment as he looked on.
The storyboard was overlaid onto the mountain location to get a quick sense of what the shot might look like. After extensive tech visulation of the area using Google maps, it was apparent that the helicopter would be extremely small and at a high altitude in order to accomplish the graceful fall.
The helicopter model was an undertaking, I knew it had to be robust and match the silhouette closely but it didn’t need every surface detail as it would be small. The rig was simple, I do always enjoy working out how things can move and designing a visually pleasing rig.
I was able to source this picture from one of the last screenings of the picture, some really invisible work by the compositing team.
A little memento here, I stumbled upon this, it was a great feeling to see my breakdown featured by CG Channel.
