The Dizzy Olympics

If you follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Google Plus or even just around in real life, I'm sure you will have already been exposed to my pimping this:

I'd like to take a moment to talk about the effects. This was actually quite a simple job. First, I tracked a couple of seconds either side of the explosion. Then I grabbed a still frame from when she's left the frame, lined it up with one where she's still in it and then linked it to the tracking data. Once I'd done that, I created an alpha matte that I animated over her head and arms. Then I added the blood, which are from Video Co-Pilot Action Movie Essentials and isolated her arms and head and animated them flying off at high speed. It was important to add motion blur to everything of course so it blended in. The last stage was creating a camera wiggle with the explosion to make it feel like there was a shock wave. All told, it took me about three hours to put it together. I'd recommend checking out Video Co-Pilot if you haven't already.