Rescue Me gets the "how'd they do that?" treatment

This is pretty cool, especially since you don't usually get to see or read about stuff like this until you're watching a featurette on a DVD set.

For those that didn't catch last night's episode of Rescue Me ("Disease," S05E12), the opening scene featured a very cool fire sequence in which Tommy, Franco, Black Shawn, and Mike had to escape a burning apartment hallway. The entire sequence was eerily cut to the high-pitched vocals of Duffy and her song "Syrup & Honey," but what came across as most impressive was how real it all looked.

Obviously, the entire thing was achieved through the magic of computer aided visual effects but now we know how. Thanks to one of our readers, Jane (she works for The Molecule, the company that was tasked with manipulating the scene), we've now got some pretty cool shots that highlight exactly how "several passes of live action footage including plates of a hallway, the firefighters, and several explosions and flame effects" were combined "into one composite which looked as if the characters were running through a burning hotel."

Here's the after shot that we all saw last night:

And here's the before shot. Obviously, there's no flames, but take a look out the window too. There's no imagery, just a bunch of tape X's that I assume were set up for something related to the green-screen. Pretty neat, huh?