One clear day we made it snow!

When Tom McGivney Creative director from ABC Advertising asked me to produce a series of ads for NYU Hospital I was psyched to be part of the team!  One of the ads created an unusual challenge in that we needed a woman holding her arms out looking up into a snow storm.  My first thought was "here comes Aspen!"  But once it was made clear to me that it wasn't in the budget to fly my whole crew plus their crew (ad agency & clients) out to the snowy slopes of Colorado we had to come up with a different idea.  My first thought was putting it together in the computer combining a combination of shots - woman, background & snow.  Now shooting the woman in the studio and combining her with a background would be easy but adding snow would be very, very tricky.  It would be to time consuming seeing that snow is translucent and has a slight "blur" as it falls.  Then I turned my ideas on snow making machines.  I spoke with a couple of different film directors who have made snow in their movies and found out they use a combination of different types of machines and fake snow depending on the look they wanted. Renting snow machines could of been away to go but it was also very costly.  And though NYU Hospital is huge they still didn't want to put up the thousands of dollars for the machines.  So I turned my attention to the theater and looked into how they created a snow scene.  They won! Outside  suspended between two stands, about 20 feet apart we hung a few large plastic boxes with the bottoms cut away and chicken wire put in its place.  Filled them with fake plastic snow and I had two assistants shake the pole that supported the boxes slowly as I shot.  The model stood underneath.  I also had a third assistant in front throwing snow up in the air in front of the camera.  This helped create the depth of the snow.  Thus we turned a clear day in to a winter wonder land!  Way within budget!!!