How exactly do you film someone jumping off a very tall building and hitting the concrete below and actually survive?

How exactly do you film someone jumping off a very tall building and hitting the concrete below and actually survive? - Low angle facade of contemporary multistory skyscraper with many windows against blue sky

In some movies, I have seen in Men in Black that a monster had fallen from top of a building backwards and actually lived.

In some other movies, there has been cases where people have fallen (the general scientific declaration of acceleration of 9.8m/s/s) from a high building and actually lived the impact of the ground below.

How do they do this? I'm sure I am missing something somewhere.



Best Answer

Ultimately, what is deemed to be plausible or otherwise is determined by the filmmakers. If they decide someone or something can live after falling off a tall building, and justify it in universe, then so be it. Examples I can think of are in Superman 2 and The Game.

As far as the techniques used for filming, it varies. Some that I've seen:

Blue/Green screen - Film a person flailing their limbs and screaming against a green screen, and composite them into a shot looking down from the top of a building.

CGI - Animate and render a model of the character falling, and composite them into the shot

Stunt fall - Have a trained stuntperson fall from a great height onto an inflatable stunt bag - filming only the jump and fall, omitting the landing.

And of course you have to show them landing. For that, you just need a separate shot where the actor/stuntperson lands after dropping from a much shorter height. My favourite example in this regard is in Terminator, where Michael Biehn was pushed off a ladder and filmed dropping hard onto the ground as he "travels back through time".




Pictures about "How exactly do you film someone jumping off a very tall building and hitting the concrete below and actually survive?"

How exactly do you film someone jumping off a very tall building and hitting the concrete below and actually survive? - Low angle of high business center with glass mirrored windows near concrete office towers in downtown
How exactly do you film someone jumping off a very tall building and hitting the concrete below and actually survive? - From below of contemporary multistage commerce buildings located in megalopolis against cloudless blue sky
How exactly do you film someone jumping off a very tall building and hitting the concrete below and actually survive? - From below of exterior of multistory residential buildings with balconies in city street under cloudy blue sky





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