As reported on Wired.
BY ANGELA WATERCUTTER
Easily the best part of Dredd 3D (after Karl Urban’s Judge Dredd scowl, obvi) is the slow-mo/Slo-Mo – both the movie’s drug of choice and the camera technique used to create the retina-stimulating scenes that accompany its use.
To create those acid-trippy images the filmmakers used a 3-D rig that was outfitted with Phantom Flexhigh-speed cameras capable of shooting at a whopping 3,000 frames per second (and higher). That footage was then played back in the movie at a more standard frame rate, making it look like super slow-motion. The result was something that was extremely critical to screenwriter Alex Garland.
“The slow-mo was very important to this film, it was identified by Alex very early on as being one of his main concerns,” visual effects supervisor Jon Thum says in the kind-of-NSFW clip above.
And as anyone who has seen Dredd 3D can attest, the results of that slow-mo method are the craziest parts to watch – especially during the flick’s high-on-Slo-Mo shoot-out in Peachtrees, which Thum notes was the result of a lot of pre-visualization with blood and fake bodies.
“The idea behind that was to make the violence look beautiful or sort of surreal in a way,” he says.
Find out more about the making of the 3-D in the clip above. The Dredd 3D comes out on Blu-ray, DVD, digital download, On Demand, and pay-per-view Jan. 8.