Rae used a crane to shoot the live-action plate for Satan’s defeat, which was then composited into a miniature landscape designed and constructed at Captive Audience.

BD: Now tell me about the “Satan Vanquished” shot at the end.

TR: That was a concept that Mel added while shooting because he wanted to pay off the character of Satan. As we were shooting, Satan had became more and more prominent. Where Mary and Satan are pacing each other in the crowd sent chills up my spine the first time I saw it in context. It’s so effective and, if you think about it, Mary is the only one in the whole film who makes eye contact with Satan. Jesus never even does. So, since Satan was becoming more of a character, Mel expressed a desire to pay that character off. We needed to see that Satan is angry that its plan has backfired. Josh did a piece of conceptual artwork and I asked Francesco Frigeri to make up a small sample piece of ground of this cracked dry earth,then I ran both of them by Mel for approval.

BD: Then what happened?

One of only three CG elements in the The Passion of the Christ, God’s tear, was done in LightWave.

TR: On 2nd unit, I shot a plate — a 115-foot crane move. The camera was pulled upward, away from the art department’s full sized section of dry and cracked earth. Caleb offered good ideas to help stabilize the camera and keep it from spinning. I wasn’t really worried about making it dead smooth. The intent was to then take that plate and do motion tracking on it. At which point I wanted to take that tracking data and translate it to a motion control system, do a matched pull out on a miniature version of Josh’s design and then marry the two of them together digitally. We did do a 3D track in Boujou, but we never used the data. Once we started crunching the budget numbers in post, we realized we couldn’t afford to do it with motion control. And since I hadn’t gotten quite the level of intensity from Rosalinda [Celentano’s] performance that Mel wanted, the shot was kind of left on hold. We even discussed re-shooting the whole thing over here in the States, but once we took the original 2nd unit plate into Flame and did just a little bit more stretch and contortion of Rosalinda’s face so she appeared even angrier, with just a bit of supernatural rage, Mel seemed to feel that it worked dramatically. Then, we proceeded to finish the shot by adding the rest of the environment outside of the full sized set. As we pull back on the desolate landscape, we go through a thin layer of CG cloudy dusty murk so one should know that it’s an unpleasant place to be.

BD: What are the other two CG elements?

TR: The maggot in Satan’s nose that was done in Maya and then the CG water droplet — God’s tear — was done in LightWave. In the follow-up shot, after you see God’s tear drop away, you are looking up at the cross and the teardrop comes toward you. That second drop is a photographic element shot at 400 frames a second. 85,000 watts illuminating an area 5 inches square. Even at that shutter speed the drop only lasted 12 frames so we resized it, looped it and then morphed it to extend its length.