Behind the visual effects with Framestore.
In the climactic moments of Adil & Bilall’s Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Miami detectives Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) find themselves facing off against several adversaries in the abandoned Gatorland theme park.
Soon they also encounter ‘Duke’, a large albino alligator which attacks Marcus and eventually consumes one of the bad guys of the film.
Here, Framestore visual effects supervisor Dom Hellier (who worked with production VFX supervisor Kris Sundberg) tells befores & afters about helping to craft the CG alligator shots, which are also mixed in with some animatronic ones.
He also breaks down some of the gunfight work in and around Gatorland, environment extensions and the light plane crash into the building.
Setting the scene
Gatorland did not exist as a real abandoned theme park, however a couple of locations were augmented to establish it in the film. “We augmented an existing building that was filmed in Atlanta,” says Hellier. “There was an abandoned building there, but we built the top story, including the actual dome, and the extended thatched roofs on the sides. Then we built out the environment beyond that. It had a lot of roads and things going to it, but the directors wanted it to appear abandoned and in the middle of nowhere. We filled it out and made it look like it was surrounded by forest with a lot of palm trees to place it in Florida. For the widest establishing shot, we actually see beyond Gatorland to the beach in the far distance, which we created as a DMP extension.”
Meanwhile, several sets were built for the interiors of Gatorland. This included the basement set that houses Duke’s swimming pool enclosure. At one point, a plane comes crashing through the side of Gatorland. Parts of this was a practical gag with a significant amount of augmentation carried out by Framestore, as Hellier explains.
“They had a great stunt rig that stood in for the fuselage of the plane and they ran that through the scene and destroyed a whole lot of stuff. We had that as a base plate for most of the shots, and we used it as great reference for our FX team. We built the whole interior that the plane would run through including the big glass window, and central column. Then we ran our CG plane through it all.”
“We set up multiple versions of the plane asset,” continues Hellier. “This was the complete asset, then with different stages of destruction, wings tearing off, propellers braking and just general scuffing. Then we built a whole lot of the props in there to be able to kick them around and have them interact with the plane and smash and break as it goes through.”
One particularly challenging aspect with that sequence was a number of speed ramps required on the shots. “There’s a lot of slow motion/high frame rate shots,” notes Hellier. “Setting up and choreographing our simulations to work in continuity across multiple shots, and look good in each of the shots, but also work correctly for the timescale, was a real challenge. But the FX team really pulled it out for that. They did a great job.”
Meet Duke
For the alligator scenes, Mike and Marcus are seen being attacked by Duke, until Mike is able to stab the creature and it disappears, only to reappear to ultimately take down rotten district attorney Adam Lockwood (Ioan Gruffudd). The actors interacted with an animatronic puppet version of Duke in the water.
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“The original brief for us was to replace this puppet in certain shots and to augment it in other shots,” details Helllier. “But then there was a creative decision to make Duke larger, after the fact. I think the initial puppet was around a nine foot gator. Just to sell the menace in the sequence, they wanted to go a bit larger, so we ended up something closer to 14 feet for Duke. That meant that we ended up having to replace him more than originally intended.”
Framestore began their Duke build with a LiDAR scan of the puppet, then scaled it up and added more embellishments such as scars, algae growing on its sides in between scales, and broken teeth – “We just tried to make him look a bit more gnarly and nasty,” says Hellier.
For animation, the VFX studio studied alligator reference, but soon realized they needed to take some creative license with how Duke would be brought to the screen. Notes Hellier: “When alligators are stalking their prey, they’re not very animated. They try to pass themselves off as a log or something like that so they don’t get detected. It was a bit of an exercise in restraint for the initial shots of having Duke there. When we get into the shots where he is more active, it was really about us making sure that he had a sense of weight and scale, and making sure that his movements felt motivated from the right position.”
Duke in the water
Synthetic water simulations that matched the practical water were key to selling the ferocity of Duke’s attacks. Hellier advises that the practical puppet shoot became a huge benefit in this area because some parts of the water interaction came ‘for free’.
“Rather than having to always do a full CG replacement of the pool, we could keep the plate water around the actors and just pick up in certain areas for the CG water. Still, blending the CG water and real water was tricky. One of our FX artists, Paul Waggoner, came up with a couple of great techniques where he was able to sculpt the starting point of his simulation to match the plate water so that essentially the ambient spectrum of the water would match pretty closely to the plate. You wouldn’t see a sudden drop-off in frequency of ripples or the amplitude of waves, which can be a bit of a giveaway generally when you’re trying to integrate those sorts of things.”
“We always made sure that the edges of our simulations got back to the spectrum that we could see in the plates for the water,” adds Hellier. “That defined how far away from Duke we could blend or how close to Duke we could blend. In some shots where it’s really frenetic, obviously we had to take over a lot more with CG water to support his motion. And then where it’s floating or slowly approaching, we could get back to the plate a lot more quickly.”
