About That Chocolate Bar
This was created as part of Miami University’s Climate Change Theatre Action Mother Earth’s Gallery of Broken Things.
The 7-minute play was filmed in front of a green screen in Miami’s television studio. I created the main background composite by photographing the architecture around the courtyard where the audience would be viewing the video (the projector was inside the office behind the center windows which were covered with a rear projection screen)
The image on the left is the original. The director wanted more building in the reflection, so I used Photoshop and a photo of the building behind the reflected tree to achieve the image on the right
The Spirit of the Amazon
In the play, the “spirit of the Amazon” appears as a woman is sitting on a bench enjoying the guilty pleasure of a candy bar. As the Spirit admonishes the woman for eating a product whose creation damages the rain forests, the director wanted the environment to become increasingly tropical. I created overlays in a painterly style evocative of Amazon indigenous artist Nixiwaka Yawanawá and this painting “Spiritual Rebirth”
I drew the overlay layers in Procreate and imported them into Adobe Premiere where I did the compositing and final video editing.
The full “tropical” look
The effect can be seen in the full video below.
When the audience arrived at the viewing site, the bench used in the video was in the space in the same spot it appears to be in the video. But it has also been transformed by the spirit of the Amazon. The painted bench was inspired by the research on the right.
Evening audience viewing the video