This article was taken from the October 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Judge Dredd polices a gritty, ultra-violent dystopia. So one of the inspirations for Dredd, the latest film version of the 2000 AD strip, may be surprising: the humming-bird. "Watching high-speed photography of birds in flight," says Alex Garland, the film's writer and producer, "you can see how the wings move. You're not thinking about the humming-bird, but you're hypnotised by the movement."
Garland, 42, aimed to recreate this effect for the scenes in the film featuring the drug Slo-Mo, "a combination of heroin and LSD, which calms you down but is clearly hallucinatory". The drug turns grisly shoot-out scenes into super-saturated, slow-motion tableaus, "to separate you from the violence. You don't notice that you're watching a kid's cheek being shot over the screen." The scenes are not purely CGI creations -- they were shot and reshot from multiple angles using the high-speed Phantom digital camera, in a painstaking process. "There was a lot of trial and error," Garland says. "We'd miss the second-and-a-half that we needed."
The film's director of photography, Anthony Dod Mantle, pumped up the colours in grading, and another team shot falling sparkly particles in front of a green screen, then superimposed them on top of the action. "You watch it," says Garland, "and you become hypnotised by someone being shot by a machine-gun."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
