Help figuring out how a scene was created - Hausu, 1977

[ShardeNA]

Hi,

I recently watched the movie, Hausu (House, 1977) by Nobuhiko Obayashi and I was really intrigued by the mirror scene where Gorgeous's face falls off in bits. I want to attempt to recreate it. I have been researching online to see if I could find a tutorial or an explaination on how Obayashi did it and so far all I've read was that he used a blue screen. I know it seems simple but I just can't wrap my head around it. Could anyone explain or point me to something similar that help me understand how that scene was created?

Thank you!

[Rick Gerard]

You need a copy of the face on a separate layer, a layer below that that shows only the person without the face (rotoscoped or greenscreen) a layer behind the face that shows the background without a person in the shot. The last step in the process would be to apply Shatter to the Face layer, animate Force 1 to break the layer apart, and use a custom shatter map or pick one of the patterns for the pieces. 

Shatter takes a bit of fiddling to get it to look good. If you want to try that approach, there are only a few decent tutorials out there that show how to use the effect. Let us know if you have any problems. 

[ShardeNA]

Thank you so much! I will try this out and let you know!