Long running Crawford's series, The Saddle Club, got the Chroma treatment recently with two VFX sequences.
Firstly, we had to create a sequence where a horse had become trapped on the edge of a sheer cliff, later being walked out of trouble by one of the kids who is lowered down from above. Obviously with both children and horses involved, our job was to come up with a cost-effective, safe and logistically straight-forward solution, that would work over multiple shots. The scene ended up being shot in a Daylesford picnic area which featured an inclined slope. The cliffs edge was defined using 30-meter runs of chroma-key fabric that ran the length of the widest shot.
3D camera tracking was used to replace the grassy picnic ground with a gaping chasm. A digi-matte of the cliff was created using a combination of photography taken nearby and 3D modeling, with the distant background created with a multi-plate matte shot acquired not far from the location.
Another sequence called for a series of shots where a donkey 'talks' while on-stage during a school concert.
Shots of the donkey were tracked and the lower jaw replaced with projection mapping to match up with the required lines.