The revised version of the impalement required the seamless combination of many different techniques: practical effects, atmospheric effects, stunt work, rig removal, CG animation, particle animation, 2D matte paintings, miniatures and pyrotechnics.

“Back at Cinesite, we worked very, very hard on blending the live-action actor and the dummy. I knew that the shot would eventually be played back frame-by-frame on the DVD, with people trying to work out at what point we were making the transition… so, it had to be perfect! Blending the two elements sounds pretty simple, but it was actually quite complicated. We spend a lot of time in 2D, replacing large parts of the dummy’s costume with still frames of the actor’s costume, massaging the colors, doing some grading… At the beginning of the transition, we also replaced the dummy’s eyes with the actor’s eyes to help blend the two faces together. We even incorporated a subtle blink on the dummy’s eyes at the moment of impact, just to add a touch of life. We also augmented the decapitation effect with extra blood elements that I had shot on greenscreen. As for the sign, we first took the real prop from the sign plate and combined it with the actor’s plate, making sure the timing was right. Then, we did a transition with the sign that actually chopped the head off in the dummy plate. So, there was a fair amount of digital massaging to make it work, all carried out in Shake, our compositing tool of choice for this movie.”

In the following shot, the headless body remains upright for a moment before falling back in a staircase. A plate was shot with a stuntman performing the action, his head covered with a green hood. A second plate captured the clean background. Compositors first painted the hood out, leaving a headless character. Then, 3D supervisor John Neill and his team used Maya to build a CG stump that was match-moved to the falling body. The model was textured with still photographs that combined meat and gory images found on the Internet. The CG team also reconstructed the back of the costume that was covered up by the stuntman’s head. The elements were then rendered in RenderMan. Final touches to the decapitation scene included set extensions. The plates had been shot on a studio backlot in Prague. In order to place the action in Israel, matte painter Dave Early created the appropriate environment in Photoshop.

Cinesite created 2D matte paintings to place the action in London. 

Blending Multiple Techniques
The other death scene that every one remembers from the original movie is the impalement of a priest on a church weather vane. In the revised version of the sequence, a lightning strikes a scaffold pole on top of a church undergoing renovation. The pole falls down onto the priest, crashing through a stained glass window. The character ends up impaled by the pole and lacerated by hundreds of shards of glass. Encompassing several highly complex shots, the sequence required the combination of many different techniques: practical effects, atmospheric effects, stunt work, rig removal, CG animation, particle animation, 2D matte paintings, miniatures, pyrotechnics… all blended in a series of seamless shots.