14 DAY TRIAL // We all know that “The Dark Knight” was one of the most highly-appraised movies of the last year, and that the parts played by Christian Bale (the Batman) and Heath Ledger (the Joker) were amazing. But no one can say that special effects and the stunts performed in the motion picture were any less remarkable. In fact, now British visual effects technicians explain how they created one of the most spectacular stunts in the movie. Towards the end, more than 5 SWAT team members dropped from the side of a building, and dangled from a single cable attached to an upper floor. Here is how that was done.
“During Batman's final confrontation with the Joker, he must prevent the Joker's hostages from being accidentally shot by the SWAT team that is assaulting the building. Batman appears to have been captured, but, at the last moment, he pushes one of the SWAT troopers out of an open window who pulls the rest of the team out with him,” Paul Franklin, one of the four visual effects technicians working for the Double Negative effects house in London, says.
The original stunt was performed on a real skyscraper in Chicago, in broad daylight. Several stunt men tied themselves to a rope and jumped off the building's facade, slamming into the walls several floors down. For safety reasons, numerous crash pads had been installed all over the edifice, and even on the streets below. As far as real stunts go, this was probably one of the most dangerous ever carried out.
After this scene was shot, it was time for the technicians to step in and do their part. They had to hand-remove the contour around each of the falling stunt man in every single one of the frames that made up the sequence with a special computer tool, so as to isolate them from the background.
After that, the whole facade of the structure was recreated using CGI (computer-generated images), in order to match the landscape of Gotham City. The most important step was then to light the scene as if it were tracked by a flickering helicopter spotlight. So, basically, a stunt performed during the day, in a safe environment, was transformed into a fall that happened during the night, on the facade of a building in construction, and all looked as sketchy as possible.