How To Have Fun At Camp

Client

Southern Cross Kids Camp

Southern Cross Kids Camp (SCKC) is a national charity camp with more than 15 camps running all over Australia. The goal of the organisation is to restore hope to kids who have experienced abuse or neglect. They take kids aged 7-12 away for a 5-day camp and pair them up with one adult that will hang out and have fun with them for the whole week. Pretty crazy right?! All SCKC camps have higher than a 1:1 ratio of adults to kids and they’re ALL volunteers.

The problem

The kids that get to go on Southern Cross Kids’ Camps have all experienced some form of abuse or neglect over the course of their short life and as a result, often have challenges managing themselves around other people and processing emotions. Each camp runs for 5 action-packed days which is a looooooong time for everyone involved if things don’t run semi smoothly. The team at SCKC needed to make kids feel safe to have fun on camp and empowered to raise any concerns they might have. They also wanted a tool that would guarantee the clear and consistent communication of the organisations’ values and expectations to every child attending a camp across Australia.

Our Solution

SCKC gave us full creative freedom with this project which was a key factor in achieving the amazing end product we were able to create! 

A safety video like no other! Well not quite like no other, we took huge inspiration from the new generation of airline safety videos. Our idea was to create a video that kids really enjoyed watching so that the information presented would actually sink in. 

We worked closely with SCKC to define exactly what needed to be communicated throughout the video. From that base script of information, we took the project through our concept development process, formulating a video script that would clearly define what the end product would look like. With solid pre-production complete, the Production phase of this project was silky smooth. Every shoot day ran way ahead of time which was quite a feat given that we were shooting with kids, animals, practical special effects and highly scheduled drone shots! To be honest, it was nothing short of a miracle. 

Post Production Notes

Post-production for this project was a beast! Our Post-Pro Master, Bailey Cook had a roaring time wrangling Houdini, After Effects and Premiere but came out on top. The vision of the project was achieved and the team and client expectations far exceeded. 

The trickiest sequence in the safety video was turning a bed into the lava.

Bailey was the VFX supervisor on set, making sure we captured the required assets for the shot including a 4K master plate, a ColorChecker reference plate, 360 HDRIs and over 300 photos of the bed.

He used photogrammetry to turn the photos of the bed into a 3.5 million polygon model. Then he tracked the camera, lined up the bed model and used it as a collider object in a fluid simulation inside of SideFX’s Houdini.

He used the temperature attribute from Houdini to generate a colour ramp and used that colour data in the GPU renderer, Redshift. He also added a smoke simulation generating from the hottest points of the lava.

After hours of rendering, the CG elements were composited on top of the original shot. Using multiple AOVs, he was able to use post FX and live-action elements to create the final look.

From the Director

For starters, huge kudos to Southern Cross Kids’ Camps for getting us to create a safety video for them. They had seen some other videos charity camps had done in the ‘camp rules’ space and knew they needed something different...something good. I mean, it's targeted at kids who have just come off the bus for a week at a camp they may be unfamiliar with so if what they’re about to watch isn’t fun and engaging then you may have a low-key riot on your hands. 

The creative freedom and trust we were given with this project was crucial! Also, I need to give a huge shout out to our Post Production specialist Bailey Cook for pulling off lava on a bed. The end result of all the special effects in this video achieved my vision beautifully!