Sequence 3 shot 8 served as the finale of the original ten-shot sequence we developed for the Ottoman Kickstarter campaign. The challenge presented by a complicated camera move like this is that you don’t really know the precise path/timing the camera will need until you have the animation in place, and you can’t animate the characters until the camera move is in place.

In the end, your only solution is to brute-force it, by starting with a best-guess camera move around an empty environment, and then animating the characters to match. You can make small adjustments to the camera timing as the animation gets refined, but you’re pretty much locked in to your starting move. So choose carefully!

Special-effects work on this shot was no less challenging—we have the deformable ground, the flame on the road flare, the smoke trail from the flame, and two different kinds of flowing sand!