Ever heard of geothermal power generation? If not… Google it. It is pretty interesting stuff. During preproduction for this video, every time we researched locations to film, we found ourselves four educational papers and two explainer videos deep before realizing what even happened. Needless to say, getting the opportunity to film some of these plants was a great experience!
We decided to use a mix of vfx, animation and live action video to tell this story. Most of the action takes place on the inside of a production pipe, where superheated steam and water is taken from two miles underground to be used for power generation. Obviously, filming water heated by magma and flying through pipes would be tough to film, so in order to really help the audience understand what was happening we created vfx to “take a peek” at what a camera couldn’t capture.
We ended up filming in the deserts of SoCal, the mountains of Utah, and in the foggy foothills of Sonoma Valley. The remote location of a geothermal plant lends itself to aerial filming, so we decided that would be the best route to take for a majority of our video. The workflow with RC drones is surprisingly smooth. Unless you’re flying fast, or in windy conditions, not much post stabilization of the video is needed. Check out the film HERE. We filmed this on a RED epic and the aerials with a GH4. Check out some of the stills above.
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