Filming miracles for a documentary series

Dec 16

Hitchhiking. Building. Animals. Angels. What do these things have in common? Another set of Explore with the Miracle Hunter episodes.

Let us elaborate on that. We were shooting in the mountains a lot in this period. Which means we had to walk to the location and carry all the equipment by hand. For one of the episodes we needed to make snow and for that, we had to carry over 50 liters of water to the location.

There were quite a few challenges for our production design team. Two of the episodes told the stories of monastery building and for that we had to build a construction site set in the 6th century. For one of the episodes, our character was hit by a pile of rocks. Our props designer made rocks out of special foam so nobody would actually get hurt. A character in another story was given a poisoned wine but before he could drink it, the wine glass shattered on its own. Again, to keep our team and our actors safe, we used a sugar glass cup, a well known trick in the film industry. Sugar glass looks like glass but is actually sugar that can be easily broken.

For this set of episodes we also worked with quite unusual actors. A crow and a deer, to be exact. Although the crow was trained and very nice to us - it was very happy to sit on our heads - it wasn't going to grab a slice of bread from the actor and fly away, as we needed it to. At the end, we just tied the bread to its leg and got what we wanted.

It was a bit easier with the deer. We only needed it to stay in one place and wait for us to get our shots on green screen. Later our VFX team set it in our mountain scenery.

Our VFX team had even more work to do with the scenes that included Archangel Michael. With jumping, flying, stabbing and arching that were all part of the story, we had our work cut out for us, but we tried our best to do justice to the majestic character.