‘Stranger Danger’: making the backgrounds

by Jeremy Cooper (Director, Designer)
See also: Movie Trivia, The special effects

To make the backgrounds I used a really neat application called MyFourWalls, which is quite sophisticated, but not expensive!

This was fun – once I’d worked out what to do!

I created three-dimensional room layouts for each house: you build the walls, stretch and shrink them, raise and lower the roof, add windows, doors, furniture and fittings: and, crucially, you can add your own textures for the walls (I used photographs of straw and sticks).

The best bit is that there is a ‘camera’ which you can move around, pan and tilt, raise and lower to get different views of the room in 3D.

The bottom part of the MyFourWalls screen shows you what the camera sees.
Here’s the background to the first shot in the Sticks House, with Panther the Pig at her desk:

And here’s the background to Porky the Pig when he comes in and explains what happened to him in the Straw House – the camera has tracked forwards and panned right to get a different point of view:

Once I’d lined up the background I wanted, I saved it as an image file and imported it to the video editor. Once there I could still manipulate it by zooming it, moving it left and right, up and down to get the background looking just right.

See also: Movie Trivia, The special effects