Band Of Brothers' Bastogne Forest Wasn't A Forest At All

The show's art department constructed the Bastogne set using two hundred and fifty trees specially fabricated by the special effects unit. According to the "Band of Brothers" making-of featurette, a clever technique was used for moments when a mortar shell blew a tree in half onscreen.

Special effects supervisor Joss Williams reunited with Spielberg on the project, moving from his previous gig as a special effects assistant to two of the filmmaker's "Indiana Jones" more than a decade prior. In the featurette, Williams describes the process of blowing up trees, noting how the Germans would fight their battles and adjusting the look accordingly:

"We created our own trees, which are a mix of fiberglass, hemp and latex, to give a broken tree look, and foam trees with a cardboard core, which reduces weight The Germans, for this section of the war, had timers on their mortar shells for them to explode in the treetops, so the soldiers not only received the shrapnel from the mortar shells, but they also had shrapnel from the affected trees."

The result allows viewers to hear the mortar spin, hear the impact, and watch a tree split in two and crumble into the frame. For actors and audiences, it looks and sounds like the tree has taken a beating. It took four more weeks of work to dress the set in fake snow, which Snow Effects Supervisor (a dream job, really) David Crownshaw describes as a kind of cellulose-polymer-plastic-paper mix, about a third of a million pounds. ' worth - the greater the amount sprinkled or puffed on a tray, he claims. With attention to detail, from the biggest floats to the tiniest snowflake, "Band of Brothers" deserves acclaim for one of the most time-accurate miniseries to hit the small screen.