John Bailey, camera operator on Days of Heaven (starting at 13:15):

“Normally the locusts would have been done in visual effects. But I think Nestor [Almendros] came up…maybe it was Nestor and Terry [Malick] but I know Nestor was instrumental in deciding that we could [shoot swarms of locusts] in actual production.

“I remember that we had the Panaflex with a reverse-run magazine. It was backloaded on the take-up side [and] we ran the camera backwards. So what happened was there was a plane that came by, full of peanut shells that were painted black. [And they were tossed out of the plane] so they were all coming down, but since the camera was running backwards it looked like [the peanut shells] were rising up into the air. And we had the actors also reverse their motion. I remember that we rehearsed it. Very carefully.”