Translation of German Cinema article, part 2, draft

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Source.

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Quale, who worked as second unit director under James Cameron on “Titanic” and “Avatar,” does use laborious CGI-technology to visualize the cataclysmic storm damages, but he relies as much as possible on handmade effects. Thus it happens that on this day, his lead actors Richard Armitage (“The Hobbit”) and Sarah Wayne Callies (“The Walking Dead”) are literally being shaken out by the wind machines and are acting in front of a background of circling debris and blazing walls of fire. “In one scene a 40-ton-semi crashes right next to us on the pavement,” Armitage relates in a pause from filming. “The stunt people drew a chalk line on the street and said, you can come this far and no further. Then the scraps were flying around our ears. The horror on our faces was not always acting.”

The stage for the shooting is a university building that is doubling as a school in a small town in Oklahoma. A dozen yellow school buses are parked on the parking lot of the campus, some of them already thrown around or knocked about by the killer wind gusts. In the subsequent scene, the school’s pupils flee into the buses, because a Category 6 Tornado is racing right toward the campus. Whether there’s every been such a Category 6 tornado has never been demonstrated scientifically.

~ by Servetus on July 28, 2014.