Making The Money Shot

See Also: 'Tunnel Vision' Episode Guide

Car crashes have gone digital.

CSI: Miami's visual effects supervisor Larry Detwiler contacted Eddie Robison from Inhance Digital to do the "money shot" for "Tunnel Vision", the eighteenth episode of the season. In the finished shot, a sinkhole opened up in a road as two cars raced by--and one car was unlucky enough to fall right in. Robison started with footage of two cars driving slowly down the road. The car on the left continued past the camera, but the car on the right stopped where the sinkhole would appear.

Robison only had that one plate to work from, so he started by using the first and last frames to make a clean frame by painting out the car on the right (a Pontiac GTO). Then he doubled the speed so that the car on the left (a BMW) would be moving at a faster pace. Robison then pulled up a replica of the Pontiac GTO in Turbo Squib and played around with it until it looked just right--he even added a driver behind the wheel for authenticity.

For the sinkhole itself, Robison used reference pictures of the actual set used to film the scenes from later in the episode. He then created the rough hole by removing part of the road piece by piece. After the sinkhole itself was created, Robison added in chunks of rubble, debris and dust to make the crash look realistic. Once he'd completed all of the pieces, Robison put it all together and created the final shot: a BMW and a Pontiac GTO speeding down the road side by side until a sinkhole suddenly appears and swallows up the GTO.

To read a much more detailed description of how the shot was created (along with pictures of the process), check out Digital Producer.

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