The Orphanage was also responsible for a scene in which the hero vehicle flips over and crashes. Detailed references were gathered on the actual vehicle for modeling and textures. The animation began with a rigid body simulation of the truck flipping, which provided a near-physically accurate representation of how the vehicle might behave. It was then modified with traditional animation by Sal Ruiz to convey the specific actions that Rodriguez was looking for. Chains and other movable objects were simulated once animation was complete. CG supervisor Mike Janov and td Joel Lelievre handled the overall look and lighting of the vehicle, as well as vfx simulations for the smoke, flying dirt, grass and chains. Mike Terpstra did the final composite.

Rodriguez wanted to reproduce the look of damaged reels and missing frames that was so typical of double feature shows. TMD artfully damaged five of the six 25,000+ frame reels by combining real film damage, plug-ins and stock footage. 

The Art of Damaging One's Work
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Planet Terror project was that Rodriguez wanted to reproduce the look of damaged reels and missing frames that was so typical of double feature shows. To this purpose, Troublemaker artfully damaged five of the six 25,000+ frame reels. The damaged look was an amalgam of real film damage, plug-ins and stock footage. "We used actual filmed damage obtained from sources such as Artbeats and Efilm, and couple of plug-ins," Bushover explains. "The main plug-ins were Cinelook for After Effects, Magic Bullet for Avid and Tinder for Shake. Additionally, we shot some practical effects for sparks, smoke, and blood splatter. These elements were all combined in Flame to produce a damage layer that was placed over the color-corrected frames, and then rendered out via an 8-node render farm running Autodesk Burn."

The color-corrected reels were approximately 30,000 frames each -- 10-bit DPX files. They were imported into SGI CXFS Infinite Storage SAN (8TB), and, from there, into the Flame systems. These ran on SGI Tezro workstations and IRIX with 4 TB of local storage each, whereas the Burn nodes were running Red Hat Linux ES3. Additional 2D work was done in Apple Shake (on both Windows and Mac Pro platforms), eyeon Digital Fusion 5 and Adobe After Effects.

"It was not as simple as screening, adding or placing the footage on top of the final plate," Brunet concludes. "We found it looked much more realistic by using a host of compositing techniques. We wrote noise expressions to alter individual color channels randomly over time as one example. We experimented and found all sorts of ways to alter the footage. Robert had us all do passes, and encouraged that we do not share resources. It allowed him to get very different takes on the same idea for his edit. It was a fun process in experimentation!"

Alain Bielik is the founder and editor of renowned effects magazine S.F.X, published in France since 1991. He also contributes to various French publications and occasionally to Cinefex. In 2004, he organized a major special effects exhibition at the Musée International de la Miniature in Lyon, France.