T2 VFX test clips, featuring ashy Sarah Connor and T-1000 milk carton footage

James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) was a ground-breaking film, with lots of cutting edge visual effects. Now, Stan Winston School has released test clips from two iconic scenes.

Stan Winston School recently posted an article detailing the visual effects that went into Sarah Connor's (Linda Hamilton) nightmarish dream sequence scene, and the scene when the T-1000 kills John Connor's stepfather.

Stan Winston School explains:

Sarah Connor's fiery doom

"The third and final puppet - an ashen form that blows away in the wind, exposing the charred skeleton beneath - was the most difficult, requiring much research and development."

"To create the effect, Shannon Shea reinforced a medical demonstration skeleton with a steel armature, and then positioned it to match the ending pose of the stage two puppet. To create the ashen material, Shea laid tissue paper and tempera paint into the mold of the initial screaming Sarah form. When it dried, he pulled that 'skin' out of the mold and carefully laid it on the skeleton like papier-mâché. Additional floating ash was simulated with gray and black paper napkins, shredded in a kitchen blender and stuffed into the form."

"Just prior to cameras rolling, Winston's crew scored the form with an X-acto knife. When the special effects crew blasted it with air mortars, all the delicate skin and shredded napkin material blew off the skeleton like ash."

Liquid metal blade hand kill

"In another scene, the T-1000 kills John Conner's foster mother Janelle (Jenette Goldstein) and takes her form. Stan Winston Studio sculpted and produced a tapered blade arm, attached by strap to Goldstein, for a shot of the woman driving the blade through the head of her husband, Todd (Xander Berkeley)."

"As the T-1000's weapon of choice, blades built for the show would number in the hundreds. Although seemingly simple, the blades posed continual challenges to Stan Winston Studio artists and technicians, since the vacu-metallizing process revealed even the most minute flaws in their form. The Janelle blade arm, for example, which was made of fiberglass and ABS plastic, had to be made and remade multiple times before the crew produced a perfect specimen."

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