PixelMagic has updated their site with some photo’s of the various stages of setup for some of the shots in the new Hotel For Dogs movie.
For practical reasons there were a limited number of dogs that were available for the production, however, the script called for hundreds of dogs in some of the wider shots. Due to budget and time constraints, CG dog duplication was not an efficient solution. Instead, McIntyre opted for a more practical approach. Using approximately 10 different dogs at any given time, numerous plates of greenscreen dogs were photographed and used by the compositor to achieve the large numbers the director required. Furthermore, with 10 different dogs come 10 different trainers which needed to be removed from the plates. As such, each shot was meticulously composed and photographed using more than one clean background. This allowed a more cost-effective procedure for removing the trainers using rotoscope and paint work, rather than 3D recreations of backgrounds.
