September 12, 2008 by

At the end of my recent set visit to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, myself and a group of journalists were given one hell of a cool special effect demonstration. special effects supervisor Steve Galich was on hand, along with executive producer James Middleton, to show us how he and his team make s**t blow up but good.

For our benefit, a car had been brought out and put on display. While I was never a regular Gilmore Girls viewer, the fact that we were standing in the area once used for Stars Hallow did cross my mind, simply because some serious mayhem was about to take place in Rory and Lorelei?s old home.

First, Galich showed us the powerful paint guns used for scenes where a character is fleeing from gunfire. You know those big sparks you see going off on the wall or street, inches from our heroes? Those are capsules from a paintball gun, loaded with bird cage gravel and the sensitive chemical zirconium, which upon impact makes a very visual spark. Galich said most of the time he?s the one off camera shooting the paintball gun, laughing, ?I have no better fun then telling one of our stunt guys, ?Run!?? Look closely below to see the large sparks the gun fired off.

A couple different journalists got to fire off the paintball gun which alone was pretty cool, as you hear the shots go off and see the large sparks go off on whatever was being shot at ? in this case a large dumpster and the aforementioned car. I was given my turn to help in the demonstration when I was given a trigger to hold. My esteemed colleague from zap2it, Daniel Feinberg, was given one of the guns and told to fire across from the dumpster to the car. Galich asked me to keep my finger off the trigger, until the shots hit the car at which point I would hold down the trigger. I wasn?t really told what would happen, so I was awfully curious.

Below is me holding the trigger and Dan firing the gun, with Galich standing with us.

Dan began shooting and I did as I was told, pressing the trigger when the shots hit the car and causing several big holes to punch across the car, one after the other ? as it turned out, I was setting off pre-rigged bullet hole effects on the car, which showed the pattern of the ?bullets? across the car.

Yes, this was really cool. Yes, my eyes are closed as I show off the bullet holes I set off.

But that wasn't as cool as what a few other guys got to do. Three of our group were each given a trigger, and Galich assigned them a number ? 1 through 3. He would call out the number and have them hit their trigger. Keep in mind that while we were standing away from the car, we weren?t that far from it?

Holy crap.

Trigger number one was pressed and BOOM! - The front hood of the car exploded, sending the hood itself hurtling into the air! As it turned out, they had tethered it earlier, so it wouldn?t, say, go flying into a crowd of visiting journalists. We didn?t even have time to react when trigger 2 was pressed, causing the center of the car to blow up. And then came number three and wow? A GIANT pyrotechnic display erupted from the trunk, shooting into high into the air in a manner I?ve only seen occur when a WWE wrestler makes their deafening entrance. The below pic captures the pyro has it began to shoot up, though not nearly as high as it went.

Small pieces of car rained down at our feat and the noise of the explosions was incredibly loud and startling ? I?m sure I yelled out in surprise, as most of us did. This was damn impressive.

Standing nearby, Terminator star Brian Austin Green (?Derek Reese?) ran over to our group, grinning like the rest of us were, and exclaimed to Galich, ?We don?t blow s**t up like that on the f**king show! You?re f**king c

Submit Blog
blog comments powered by Disqus