Dust and dirt, that's what filmmakers are made of!

This is a combo deal - a shoot special and an effects special mixed together. Actually, it's two shoots, so double bonus!

It had been determined pretty much since the first shoot that pickup shoots would have to be done. Primarily for the river scene, which, of course, was shot several months ago and already has it's own special. But there was also the ground-cave-away scene. The human element (Matt slamming into a cliff) had already been recorded. But there were several things missing. Matt was recorded landing on a 10-foot cliff with a road behind him and there was no "caving ground" or floating dust that would have to be in the shot to complete the effect.

So, basically three things were needed:

1. Pictures of cliffs and video of the ground falling away.

2. Video of dirt falling.

3. Video of dust floating.

The first idea was to make a model of the complete scene and shoot that, but considering that only three shots were needed, it seemed like too much trouble to make a model. Also, since all three shots were going to be mixed with hand-held video footage, trying to work with a model would be really difficult.

The second idea was to go up to Sharon National Park about an hour north of Tel Aviv. It's a location with huge, cool cliffs overlooking the ocean. Since there were plenty of cliffs and dirt, both the cliff/ground shots and the falling dirt could be recorded at the same time. So that's what was done.

It was a rainy day... which is rare for Israel. Rain in the Tel Aviv area during the summer months is practically unheard of. But this was during January - the rainy season in Israel. As you can see, it was nice and muddy in the parking lot. First time Peter had driven on slick mud. It was fun and, hence, required a little zigzagging!

Sharon National Park is a really neat area. It's a series of cliffs overlooking the ocean about a hundred feet up.

Andy and Matt came along to kick dirt, take pictures and generally have fun!

It was raining most of the time we were there (notice the bags over the video camera and Andy's digital camera). Of course it stopped right as we headed back to the car.

This picture brings up another thing - the camera! You may have noticed that this is not the camera that was used to record the other too shoots. Peter had already shipped his video camera back to the states in preparation for going there. So he borrowed a friend's video camera, which happened to be Hi8. Peter had no capability at the moment to transfer the tape to MiniDV or capture it straight off the Hi8 camera... so he ended up transferring it to VHS and then to MiniDV and then captured it. Luckily the footage was only to be used in pieces, so the LARGE quality difference wasn't too noticeable in the final composites.

This is mostly what we did - kick dirt down slopes. I'm not sure what the national park authorities would have thought... maybe they didn't want that dirts at the top of those cliffs!

Unfortunately the tripod had also been shipped, which would end up making for a lot tracking work in post-production. But it went well, over all, and we got some good footage recorded!

Dirt wasn't the only thing shot. Andy was also snapping pictures of cliffs and Peter was recording footage of the ground (moving the camera up and down to create illusion of the ground caving away).

A month or so later, and on the other side of the world. Peter was working on the ground-caving sequence and got to the point where he had to have puffs of dust to add into the scene, billowing up from the cracks in the ground. This time it was pretty standard because something like dust had been recorded before - cold-air breath. It was for Tranquil Storm's movie Wassail and that time we'd used cigarette smoke against a black screen. Since the smoke was white and the background black, it could be separated out and animated onto the mouths of the actors in post-production to create the illusion of cold-air breath.

But this was a little different because the dust had to come in gusts and be more... billowy, for lack of a better word. It had to be heavier, blast out and spread. On top of that, it's color had to be changeable so that it could be a couple different shades of tan.

Poooof! Flour! It had about the right weight and billowiness. Peter was the air source, shooting flour from above, from the side and from the ground.

This is the setup. Pretty simple: bag of flour, black cloth, Micah to man camera, and a very floury Peter. Flour has a way of getting up one's nose...

Moving right along to post-production...

The shot above is a sequence of how the falling dirt was separated out onto a separate layer. As you might expect, a lot more is involved than can be shown here. For one thing, all of the falling-dirt shots had to be stabilized before anything could be done with them. Then a still frame was taken out. Then, After Effects was told to find the difference between the still frame and the clip of the dirt falling. Basically, it looked for what moved (see second image above). The foot obviously moved, and so did the dirt that fell. You can see that it is anything but perfect, but it works well enough. This was then matted (third image above) to isolate the part of the dirt wanted.

The dust followed a similar sequence, but the separation method was different. A tan layer was told to use the luminance of the footage as its alpha channel. This is, whatever was bright in the footage (like the flour) appeared as tan on a new layer (see middle image above). This was then matted to select only the dust.

Getting there!

The next step (and the hardest step) was to composite all of the elements - photo of a cliff, dirt elements and dust elements - all into a shot behind and in front of Matt, while matching the camera motion of the original hand-held shot.

I'm going to go through this quick:

The shot was stabilized using the background (the road, see first image above) as the reference point. Then a complex matte was used to cut out the ledge and Matt onto a separate layer. Then the cliff photo was taken into Photoshop and heavily edited to erase bushes and match its color to the ground color of Mitzpe Ramon (where the footage of Matt was recorded). Then the dirt and dust elements were inserted one at a time behind Matt to give the illusion of the cliff having freshly caved away. The time on the dirt was drastically increased to make it appear to be falling long distances. More dust was added in front of Matt, again slowed down to increase the apparent scale. Then a colorizing layer was slapped onto of all of this (see third image above) to give it a look similar to the temptress scene (this is part of the temptress scene, but has slightly harsher appearance). Finally, the original camera motion was re-introduced to the shot.

Whew! You might not have caught all of that, but its pretty similar to compositing techniques used in earlier shots, so, for more details, look at previous specials.

And here's the final effect! In beautiful widescreen and everything! Compare this to the sequence above to see how far it came!

Let me know if you enjoyed this special!

And don't forget that you can now see the preview-trailer! It doesn't have this shot in it (because it was made after the trailer), but there's plenty of other cool shots in it!