Monday, October 20, 2008

The Mummy: The Flashback Tomb Location (The Red Rock Canyon Series)

Halloweener #5

The flashback sequence in the movie is really in the same area as the dig excavation of my last entry. For this reason I did not feel the need to do a video of it. If you want to see the area then refer to that video; when I go up that incline I would have to come back down it to show where the funeral procession was heading. There is a trick to the following picture. Take a look and I will try to explain:
Most of the locations in Red Rock Canyon are easy to find. This one confused me a bit, and since there is no need for me to reinvent the wheel, I refered to Richard Schmidt's A Field Guide To Motion Picture Locations at Red Rock Canyon. The book was helpful regarding the issue, but I still did not quite get what was going on until I got home. What you see in the movie picture is an optical illusion. It looks like one solid ledge on a mountain side, but it ends up being two different places separated by a few hundred feet.
The picture above, Hagen Cliffs, is the background in the upper right side of both pictures. This is the picture that really threw a monkey wrench into what I normally do. I could line up a bunch of rocks, but would get lost in the middle. Where is that ledge they were walking at? After examing my pictures over and over and then reading Schmidt's book I realized the error I was making. Keep in mind I am going to have to go back to this area to get the correct picture, but the following picture should help in figuring out the key to this puzzle. The above picture is our incline. This is where they funeral procession was coming down from. If you look closely in the upper right background you should see the top parts of Hagen Cliffs. My picture has the same type of illusion in that everything looks connected when it isn't. So, what I have to do when I go back is, turn around, go up higher, and then shoot the picture in this direction again; there is another area I can climb up for this. I will take a picture of this incline, but also get Hagen Cliffs in the background. It should look like the movie picture. Interesting enough, I had another problem like this with another movie location I was trying to find where two areas looked like they were connected, but were not. I will show that location at another time. Now what about the actual tomb location?
In the excavation they show them discover the tomb as a hole in the ground. The flashback sequence is still roughly in the same area. I pointed it out in the video, but here is the picture that best shows where they did it:

I went ahead and circled the rock you can compare with the movie picture. It is the same as the big bloated rock formation on the right side of the picture. For the movie, they added a wall there that represented the tomb entrance.

The Mummy at Red Rock Canyon (Youtube Version)

The Mummy at Red Rock Canyon (Vimeo Version)