The film opens with the future war sequence, and the classic shot of an endoskeleton's foot crushing a child's skull. "That is one of the shots you always see from this movie," said Winston. "The skull is crushed, the camera moves up to the endokeleton's head, with its glowing eyes, and its head turning this way and that, looking for its next victim. That was a full- blown animatronic robot! And it was a big advancement over what we had done for the first Terminator." A team of twelve puppeteers standing off-camera operated a series of cable, rod and radio controls to create the endoskeleton performance in the opening shot -- some on the crushing leg, some on a waist twist mechanism, some on the neck, some operating a hydraulic bicep action, and others on the various head and eye movements. "This tracking shot moves up to the child's skull buried in the dirt," explained Mahan, "and then the foot smashes down on top of it, and the camera pulls back to reveal the whole endoskeleton." Mahan continued, "So the illusion is that this endoskeleton has walked up and stepped on this skull. How it worked, though, was that the endoskeleton's left leg was planted on the set, and its right leg was smashed down on the skull with a rod that was connected to the calf, which would then trigger-release so that the guy operating it could grab the rod and get out of shot before the camera moved up. It was a five or six-foot rod, so the puppeteer was pretty well out of frame anyway. He could just hoist it up, smash the leg down, pull it out, and step back out of the shot as the camera moved up." Shane Mahan and the crew had fashioned twenty-eight crushable, brittle wax child skulls for the shot, which they brought to the Terminator 2 set. "I thought twenty-eight skulls was overkill," Mahan commented. "I thought that would be way more than enough. But we did take after take of that shot, and each time, some little thing would go wrong. It was very complicated, because there was a lot of stuff that all had to work together. There were explosions going off in the distance that had to time out just right. Plus, just getting the look of the leg crashing down on the skull, how it shattered, how the camera pulled up, how the endoskeleton looked when it pulled up, getting the rod out in time -- all of that had to be coordinated. So here we were, out in some old steel yard in Fontana, shooting this huge scene at three o'clock in the morning, and I'm running out of skulls. We're using them up in take after take, and I'm just praying that we get the shot before we run out of skulls. By take fifteen, I was thinking, 'Okay, well, we've used a lot, but we're going to get this shot in the next take or two.' By take twenty, I was thinking: 'God Almighty! I've only got eight left! What am I going to do if we run out?' Of course, I didn't mention to anybody that we were running out of skulls. I was just sweating it out secretly, wondering how I was going to break the news to Jim. Any other director, ten skulls would have been plenty. But with Jim, you make a lot more of everything -- and it still isn't enough. We had two skulls left in the box when we finally got it. I was so thankful." "Jim still wasn't really happy, though," SWS "Lifer" & Legacy Effects mechanical designer Richard Landon recalled. "He just said, 'Well, I guess that's the best I'm going to get,' and he moved on. And we were so disheartened, thinking we'd failed him, and hoping against hope that he got something he could use. But then, when we came in the next day, Jim called me and John and Shane into his trailer, and he popped in a videotape of the shot from the night before, and he was all excited. 'Watch this! It's perfect!' And it was like the fourth or fifth take! That's the take that is in the movie."

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