Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1449234
where it would sit in the farm's barn for decades. It was crucial for us to find the right balance between the realism of rust and deterioration, while still preserving the character of this iconic picture car. The Farmhouse Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a mystery that slowly unravels during the film, and the farm becomes a critical part of that puzzle. The audience doesn't know what happened to Egon since the events of Ghostbusters II. So, in designing the set, the Art Department was able to infuse it with who he was, his personality, and also conceal secrets and drop clues as to what he had been up to. Jason Reitman's filmmaking background is in locationbased films, but due to the complex nature of the eectsheavy action involving the farmhouse, I pushed to build the farmhouse twice: once on location for the day scenes and wide exteriors, and a second time on stage, for the complicated eects work that would take place at night in the third act resolution of the film. his made logical sense as our cast—made up mostly of child actors—were not allowed to shoot late into the night. With Jason, a bucolic field located fortyfive minutes south of Calgary was selected, and without waiting a minute, Art Director Bill Ives ew his DJI Phantom Pro drone to chart a programmed grid over the site so that we could create a photogrammetry model. Metashape is a fantastic application that takes hundreds of overlapping photos from the drone video, and then processes the video by recognizing the same point from multiple photos to build a point cloud and 3D mesh from the data. Bill would then take the 3D model of the location into Blender (an open-source 3D toolset), and import the highly detailed farmhouse model onto the actual location, showing us real site lines and elevation changes. Not only that, we could all visualize the master shots on location, with accurate lens angles and sun positions, all rendered at a "game engine" quality with baked- in shadows and texture maps. This approach felt magical—so helpful to spur design conversations and evolve the set designs— that Bill used the technique for all the key sets in the movie. (Capturing locations and then importing set designs into Blender.) The design model of the farmhouse (started in Los Angeles), was further developed by Calgary Set Designer Evan Spence. Evan iterated on the E. FARMHOUSE. ILLUSTRATION BY JIM CARSON OVER A 3D MODEL BY CHRIS CORTNER. F. EGON'S FARMHOUSE WAS REBUILT ON STAGE, WITH THE INTERIOR FULLY DRESSED AND A "TRAP FIELD" OF PRACTICAL GHOST TRAPS. SET PHOTO. G. EGON'S FARMHOUSE BUILT ON LOCATION, SOUTH OF CALGARY. PRODUCTION STILL BY KIMBERLY FRENCH. E F G