The 'Madeline Falls' sequence from 'Death Becomes Her', in which Meryl Streep's character appears with her head twisted around backwards, consists of 13 shots which took a. crew of 20 specialists four months to complete. Three live-action background plates were filmed: one with Meryl wearing a stretchy blue hood over her head and walking backwards, one with no-one at all, and one of Meryl in a blue bodysuit against a blue screen. Using these three shots, the blue hood was digitally removed and replaced with the corresponding background area from the 'clean plate' onto which Meryl's head from the third plate was match-moved into position using ILM's own software. Finally a computer-generated, twisted neck was modelled, animated and match-moved to fit between head and body. All elements had to be color-balanced and composited with each other and with other elements such as shadows and reflections, also using in-house ILM software.


Technical Background

HW: Silicon Graphics
SW: SoftImage, Renderman, Alias, Parallax, Photoshop and ILM Proprietary

ILM/Industrial Light & Magic is a division of LucasArts Entertainment Company in San Rafael, California, specializing in Computer animation fo r film production. Collaboration on films like “The Abyss”, “Terminator I I ” and most recently “Death Becomes Her”.
ILM has won numerous international awards, for instance the “Honorary Nica ” at Prix Ars Electronica '92 for “Terminator II”, Academy Award (Oscar) for “Death Becomes Her” 1993. The Visuel Effects Supervisor for “Death Becomes Her” was Ken Ralston, who joined the Company in 1977 as a cameraman on “Star Wars”. Since then, he has been responsible for visual effects on several productions, winning Academy Awards fo r his work on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, “Cocoon” and “Return o f the Jedi”.