The trail was set to build audience’s awareness and excitement ahead of the BBC’s coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics which starts 7th February in Sochi, Russia.

The film is a mix of live action plates, backgrounds, miniatures and effects elements.

Our set was a mix of the 1 day shoot at the bluescreen inside the studio. And second day on the actual ice rink. On one hand bluescreen setup was pretty straight forward – there was not much philosophy there on the other hand, we had the ice rink shoot which was quite a bit of a challenge. Setting up the screens on the ice made no sense as the athletes usually were exploring long distances and there was no time and exact idea how to shift the screens from shot to shot. Doing it around the whole rink was no go from time and budget perspective. So we need to take a lot of rotoscopy under consideration and this is how it went along.

We did lots of simulations before we reached the desired effect. Some shots were quick and dynamic close-ups, others showed mountain scenery from a far distance which required a completely different setup simulation, balancing wind speed and turbulence seen from so far away. To meet all these phenomena we have studied many mountain and mountaineering films. The main tools for snow were Fume FX, Particle Flow, Krakatoa and Ice particles (Softimage).