Samurai Stabbing
For this scene in “The Last Samurai”, Tom Cruise’s character is supposed to stab the attacking Samurai through the neck with the end of the spear in his hand.
The principal photography was only able to capture a truncated spear stopping at the edge of the stuntman’s neck. This subsequently prohibited the needed thrusting of Tom’s arm to make the deathblow appear realistic. In order to create the illusion that the spear was being pushed through the Samurai’s neck, I first needed to remove the practical spear, as well as the arm holding it.
This was just a matter of reconstructing the background in the areas covered by both the arm and the spear. I sampled as much existing information from the frames where the arm and spear were slightly out of the way. And then cloned the rest of the information in to fill in the gaps.
Once Tom’s practical arm and spear were removed from the scene, I fashioned a new arm as a multilayered photoshop document. This made animating the new arm easier, as I had individual layers for the hand, forearm, and shoulder.
I then built an extension for the spear complete with jagged edge and bloody tip. The spear was built in segments in order the facilitate a slight bow to the shaft as it pierces the Samurai’s neck. All of the layered files were then brought into After Effects and placed in the scene as parented objects. I could globally control the orientation of the arm and spear, or fine tune the bend of the arm in two places or the bow of the spear in ten. This allowed for a finer level of control when match moving the end of the spear with the frantic motion of both the Samurai and Tom.
Once the new arm and spear were animated, I concentrated on polishing up the shot. Since the spear is piercing the jugular of the Samurai, there needed to be large amounts of blood oozing from his neck.
Production decided for continuity reasons that they did not want the blood to spatter onto Tom. But that they did want blood on the Samurai.
I created a warp track to get the blood to properly match move with the Samurai’s armor. First I took a still of the armor from the first frame and animated trickling blood dripping down it. Then brought the still frame of the armor back into the scene and 2D match moved it and got it close. Then I used Re:Flex warp, and drew motion splines all over the armor. I created intricate warps that forced the perspective of the still to wrap around the contours of the moving Samurai’s footage. Then in the still frame’s pre-comp I turned off the visibility of the armor so that only the animated blood was visible and then color corrected it into the scene.
Original Footage
Final Composite
