Simulate a ghost rider transformation

Syawish A rehman shows how to make a transformation scene inspired by Ghost Rider

The tricks needed to make skin peel off a face to reveal a burning skeleton underneath

G host Rider shined as one of the new characters in Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. You know what it means when Ghost Rider appears; first, that some sinners are going to be burned and second, there are going to be some really cool Ghost Rider transformation scenes, where you’ll see a living breathing dude turn into a firey skeleton. There are some interesting things that happen when Ghost Rider transforms and we’ll be breaking all of them down in the same way as his skin changes: piece by piece.

The first thing that happens is that his skin starts to boil. You can see bubbles appearing, in a similar way to when you heat some plastic. Then, the skin starts to break off in patches; it’s really interesting to see these cracks as they start appearing. Eventually, the skin starts flying off, thanks to environmental factors like wind. From below, his skull starts showing but there’s a very neat and sort of controlled chaos in the way his skin cracks. The parts that later show a lot of fire are the first ones to burn off and they burn very quickly. Some lines show up at the top of his skull because that’s the part that’s actually the hottest, since all the fire is focussed there. Although, not a lot of fire actually shows up until his skin has completely burned off. These are all artistic choices – you can do things your own way if you want but I’ll try and follow what happens in the TV episodes as much as possible.