This video is of the Mississippi Department of Education building, which in the movie is a high school where people are being held hostage by terrorists. The military has to break through the wall of the high school to get in, and it was my job to set all this up to get the explosion. The director told us to "make it sexy," and that's what we did. We used at least four mortars (really large, heavy-duty bombs), eight party packs (wooden boxes with sand, fake glass, dirt, or cork, and a bomb at the bottom), and several propane poppers to make this explosion look realistic. I along with the rest of the sfx team spent 4 hours setting this up and hand-making every explosive.
Fun Fact: Legally, I was not supposed to be within 100 feet of this explosion when it went off because I could be hurt by the shrapnel, but I had to get the shot on my phone, so I dove into the bushes across the street, hiding from the director and camera operator. The director wanted the shot I had, but the camera operator did not want to get injured, so they ended up shooting from off to the side. I did get hit in the face by some light debris, but I was not hurt by any means. The next day, I showed the director this video, and he absolutely loved it.
This is another angle of the same explosion that one of the special effects techs I was working with took from the roof off to the side.
This is some work we did to imitate smoke and haze as the actors were getting out of a van. We used a fog machine and had to direct that through a fan. It took a surprising amount of work to get this right because of the wind that night.
This used a few propane poppers and some fire bars to simulate the effect of a Molotov cocktail being thrown into a van. We had to connect the poppers and the bars separately because we wanted some parts of the explosion to take place before others to make it as realistic as possible.
This is something I had to spend quite a long time rigging. I had to place about 30 little explosives under the hood of this Prius so that when they blew up it would look like the Prius was getting shot. We call these little bombs bullet hits. each bullet hit takes about five minutes to attach to the hood and run to the clunker, which is the control panel that times the explosions (think "big red button"). We wanted to have bullet hits across the entire windshield, but the stuntman was scared and wanted to wear goggles for the shot, which would have completely ruined it. He also got mad that the airbag deployed, which we warned him about multiple times. He was a real diva, which I thought was hilarious.
Here we have some bullet hits, but on a person! We had the talented Kevin Dillon (Johnny Drama from Entourage) put my friend Curtis Nichols over his shoulder, and from the camera's POV, it looks like Dillon is shooting through Nichols's chest! We rigged each of those hits to go off in a certain sequence and to deploy little packets of fake blood that we made.
I had to take them all apart after this and it was a lot of fun scaring my friends when I sent them pictures.
