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How did the shoot the intro to "Get Low"?


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It's two shots blended together, one of the stuntman falling out of the window, then another of the house on fire and the stuntman running past the camera.

 

From the August 2010 American Cinematographer:

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A more outlandish sequence to film practically and piece together digitally was the burning of an old house, a scene that opens the film and plays an important role in the story. The initial challenge, of course, was finding a real house the production could burn. "The scene was in danger of getting cut from the schedule for weeks, but we sent loca- tion scouts far and wide looking for a place that would work," Boyd recalls. "We came across a long-abandoned house halfway through production; it was out along a two-lane highway that we could control at night. We put five or six cameras out there, including a couple of Eyemos, and one on a dolly track in the woods that I operated myself. Basically, we had one crack at it. We timed it at magic hour, with a small amount of skylight left when the house went up, and it was over in about 30 minutes."

 

To complete the illusion, the filmmakers had to show a man bursting out of a second-story window, running across the roof, leaping to the ground and running into the woods. That requirement led the team to film the burning house in two rapid takes. Schneider explains, "We first had a controlled burn around the edges of the windows for when [the stuntman] bursts out and jumps off the roof. Then, we quickly reset before the sky went dark and hid a stuntman in a little heat shelter where he had left off in the previous take. We set the house fully ablaze, and when the fire reached the right level, we cued the stuntman to run across the field toward and past the camera. The intent was to blend the first shot of the controlled burn and stunt with the second shot of the man running away from a raging fire to make it look like one seamless shot. As a visual effect, the shot was composited by tiling different portions of the controlled-burn element with other tiles from the raging-fire element to create a mosaic of blended elements. For example, if a chunk of roof falls off four minutes into the burn, you can blend that with another piece of action from the first minute, such as the moment when a neighboring tree catches fire, and create your own custom inferno. Since the shot was locked off, it was almost like compositing a live-action shot with itself."

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