BACKWARDS HEAD effect tutorial! - After Effects

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Here's how we did our latest fun 'impossible' video effect - turning your head completely backwards just like Meryl Streep in 'Death Becomes Her'! It's also a little similar to the famous head / neck twist in The Exorcist, though played for more laughs...

Death Becomes Her was a technologically complex movie to make, and represented a major advancement in the use of computer-generated effects, under the pioneering direction of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM).

Creating the sequences where Streep's head is dislocated and facing the wrong way around involved a combination of blue screen technology, an animatronic model created by Amalgamated Dynamics, and prosthetic make-up effects to create the look of a twisted neck. For most of the key shots they shot Meryl wearing a blue mask and then composited in her head from a different take where she performed in front of a blue screen on a rocking gimbal with similar lighting.

We shot this effect by doing multiple passes of the same move but as usual we tried to take the effect further by using real camera movement. ILM had motion control, but we don't, we just had a regular slider. We used gravity to get a similar shot each pass by setting one end of the slider the little higher than the other. We then shot three passes, the backwards walk, the head against blue screen and a clean background to hide any difficult joins. The compositing was done in Adobe After Effects simply using Keylight and a bit of motion tracking.

We gave our effect a Christmas twist, but this could also be a good halloween prank!

If you like this you'll probably like our superhero landing effect:

And our 'smash through glass window' effect:

And our Mission Impossible Mask Effect:
And our 'missing face' effect:

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Watch our other tutorial videos here:
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Mission Impossible mask effect tutorial:
Missing face skull effect tutorial:
Train jump effect tutorial:
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Movie mashup tutorial:
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Custom zoom transitions tutorial:
Original Mission Impossible mask effect tutorial (2015):
Matte painting tutorial:
Add yourself to movies (actor replacement) tutorial:
Doctor Who regeneration effect tutorial:
Ghost moving through solid door effect tutorial:
Add yourself to stock footage tutorial:

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