Sweet CGI in Sleepy Hollow

All problems can be solved with a little creativity and determination. If one desires to film a headless man without needing to hire a headless actor, apply some ingenuity, measurements, knowledge of CGI, and green hoods to make that head come right off! No gore or legal fees required!

• Film the actual actor in the Headless Horseman's place
• give him a fancy green hood and a special collar (fancy fancy)
• and finally, take the scene into a computer and digitally chop his head off

Making guys explode like a crumbling statue was another task that the Sleepy Hollow staff had to overcome. First, they took a shot of one of the Acolytes jumping down a few steps, then they digitally removed him and replaced him with a cluster of rocks and dust. I didn't even know that was possible to do with a real person D:

Last but certainly not least, the team had to give life to the dead (well, a nonliving object really, but close enough)! The task was to animate the Phiale and make the little skulls move around. The process was:

• The scene was shot with the inanimate prop built by their art department
• A photogrammetry model was made of the item to use as a base for animating
• The prop was animated to look like it had skulls that move

I thought that the whole process of the headless horseman was my favorite, because it took a lot of creativity to come up with that solution (and I thought the Headless Horseman looked kinda cool). The headlessness looked pretty convincing and it was an entertaining scene to watch.

The process of making the Phiale seems really confusing (and I'm not 100% on if I even got the steps right ^^; sorry). Turning a 3D inanimate object into a 3D CGI animate object seems like an almost unreal task (based off of my extremely limited knowledge of 3D animation) but somehow, they did it :D Congratulations Sleepy Hollow team!

How do you make a photogrammetry of something? Does it get scanned and uploaded to a computer or something like that?