Corbould's 17-person crew, which expanded to upwards of 40 people for certain sequences, created two different types of explosions on the beach, using air cannons for anything remotely close to the actors, and slurries, high explosives used for mining, in the background. "For the slurry explosives, we basically dug a hole in the sand, put a 2" thick metal plate at the bottom with the charge, and then covered it with special sand we had shipped in," Corbould recalls. "It was quite funny that we were actually bringing sand onto the beach, but it had to be washed and sieved for safety. A rock flying around at high velocity is like shrapnel. We probably had about four to six slurries per take, and if we had time, we tried to load up for a second take, so we could do two takes at a time. For grenade explosions near the actors, we buried eight air cannons in the sand and spread them over an area of about 60 square feet. That was very time consuming to lay in, so we told Steven, 'This is where they are,' and he basically choreographed the action in respect to where we had laid the air cannons. These cannons were instantly repeatable. All we did was shut the valves, fill them up with air again, load some sand and water back in, and then off you go!"
The air cannons were particularly safe and useful for the many horrific shots of soldiers being blown skyward as their arms and legs were blasted off by mines and shells. To depict these graphic casualties, Corbould and his crew worked with amputee stuntmen fitted with fake limbs. "We got the idea from what [Ryan stunt coordinator Simon Crane] did on Braveheart, but our techniques were different because the battles in that film were all swordplay," Corbould notes. "We brought in about 20 amputees, but only six of them really had acting potential. Once they had their [prosthetic] limbs blown off, it really comes down to grimacing and screaming. After we molded their stumps, I asked [the firm of] Gorton and Painter, who were brought on the production to create corpses and dead animals, to make some limbs for us. They built some very realistic ones using silicon, complete with implanted hair. We then rigged breakaway joint mechanisms on the amputees, which would separate the prosthetic limb from the performer at the right moment. Much of this was done by simply planting squibs into balsa wood joints. After dressing the inside of the arm or leg where the bone and tissue would show, we placed body protection around where the limb was going to blow and tucked in a lot of blood. The hardest bit was making the uniform tear correctly as the squib went off. In the end, we had to rub the material down with glass paper so it was wafer thin. Then we cut the back so that it wasn't attached — otherwise, the material would hang on, which wasn't good for every shot. We had about three guys, including my brother, Ian, working non-stop assembling prosthetic limbs and blowing them apart.
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