Here’s how VFX helped enhance the incredible practical stunts and SFX in ‘The Fall Guy’. From befores & afters magazine in print.
In one of the opening scenes of David Leitch’s The Fall Guy–right before the descender rig accident of Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling)–the camera follows Colt around the lobby area of a building. It passes producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) who says, ‘We can’t replace his face…’. In somewhat of a meta moment, that line from Gail did, in fact, involve a face replacement on Waddingham, owing to a change in the original line performed.
“We had Hannah do the ADR in London in front of some reference cameras and Rising Sun Pictures did a line replacement with their machine learning REVIZE system,” explains The Fall Guy visual effects supervisor Matt Sloan. “Nobody knows we changed it, it’s completely invisible.”
Indeed, this would be just one of several face replacements done on The Fall Guy, and also indicative of the many invisible visual effects crafted for the film. Around 1400 VFX shots were created, helping to add to the wealth of stunts and special effects making up key action scenes like the skip bin chase and helicopter escape, and the movie within the movie, Metalstorm.
Here, we break down just some of the work from the key vendors–Framestore, Cinesite, Rising Sun Pictures, Crafty Apes and OPSIS–and share a few moments that you may not have realized contained any VFX at all.
Making Metalstorm
After his accident, Colt returns to the world of stunt performing by coming to work on his former girlfriend Jody Moreno’s film, Metalstorm, in production in Sydney. It’s on this set that visual effects were employed in a range of ways, again to enhance practical effects and stunts, and for a few fun gags, plus for clips from the actual ‘finished’ Metalstorm itself.
One moment sees Colt endure a wire gag stunt where he is smashed against a rock and then set on fire. Shots of Gosling lying on the ground on fire, in particular, made use of added digital fire by Cinesite. The studio based their work on reference of a stunt performer on fire and some practical fire elements.
“Practically what we had was the plate with Ryan Gosling falling on the ground, and then we roto-mated him,” says Cinesite visual effects supervisor Jennifer Meire. “Then we used advanced computational fluid dynamics solvers and also combustion models to simulate the turbulence of the flow of the gaseous fuel, the heat release, and all the smoke. The buoyancy, the vorticity and dissipation was actually the very important part of the shot, because there is also the fire extinguisher that they use to turn down the fire very quickly. Finally we added some of the 2D elements of smoke to make it a little more organic.”
For scenes from the Metalstorm film, Framestore was called upon to deliver a range of visual effects shots. “The important thing here,” observes visual effects supervisor Nicolas Chevallier, from Framestore, “was that we wanted to make sure that it was understood that there is this funny difference of scale between the set shown in the movie–which is only a tiny set–to the final big film with the spaceship, lasers and all that battle.”
While filming Metalstorm–and in fact for his first stunt moment on returning to set–Colt is tasked with performing a car cannon roll. On location at a Sydney beach, a practical stunt was performed by Logan Holladay, who managed to conduct a world record eight-and-a-half rolls caught on camera.
Sloan happened to be captured during a take for the stunt on a b-roll camera jokingly saying, ‘Why am I even here?’ when the stunt proved successful. “It was an amazing shot, eight-and-a-half rolls, things flying off the car, the helicopter bailing out–absolutely stunning and spectacular. It worked. I am just on set for things like that when it doesn’t.”
The skip bin chase
The skip or rubbish bin chase through Sydney is a perfect example of practical effects and digital visual effects coming together to create a dynamic scene. In it, Colt finds himself being dragged behind a bin truck and then grappling with an adversary on and around the vehicle as it powers through the city, even over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. During the chase, the bin sometimes spins or is dragged on its side, crashing into things on the roadway. Action designer and assistant fight coordinator Micah Moore, working with the film’s stunt coordinator Chris O’Hara, built previs scenes in Unreal Engine for the chase.
“Once we had that,” details Sloan, “it was about talking to stunts and talking to special effects about what they would be supplying and how they would be able to do these things practically. SFX supervisor Dan Oliver would say, ‘We can make the bin spin, would you rather there was nothing above and a spin rig under the bin, or above?’ We figured the spin rig below the bin would make it 20 to 30cm off the road. That would’ve been a much easier clean-up rig-wise, but we would’ve ended up having to adjust the road and adjust the truck, so having a massive arm out the top was the clear option on that one.”
The stunts were filmed by locking off several streets in Sydney, with Gosling and stunt performers often secured to the vehicles with wires and rigging which would eventually be painted out. Framestore and Cinesite both worked on the sequence. “In many of the shots,” outlines Framestore’s Chevallier, “we had to make a CG version of the truck and bin in order to be able to lower the bun and add some light interaction and sparks. It was a lot of advanced clean-up too, with the rigging.”
“They also did some crazy stunts, sometimes even Ryan himself, where they were on this platform skating behind,” adds Chevallier. “But they could not put any cars close by so sometimes we had to change the traffic a little to add more danger. It’s how we can complement the work of SFX with our work. It’s not replacing it, just enhancing it.”
One of the biggest challenges Framestore had was dealing with the rotating bin. “We had to remove this massive rig that they had with the truck,” says Chevallier. “That also meant we had to replace part of the street and part of the truck and sometimes the road itself. For some of the shoot it was raining, so we had to de-rain the plates and remove mist and droplets.”
Cinesite concentrated on what was seen from inside firstly Colt’s vehicle when he is chasing the truck and then from inside the bin truck as well. An array car from XM2 featuring seven cameras had been employed to shoot driving plates, as shots showing the actors in the respective vehicle cabin were filmed on stage. “Our comp team took all those arrays and would re-speed everything for the right speed of the camera moves and change some of the lighting on the tile plates,” describes Cinesite’s Meire. “I think the result was quite realistic and it’s very difficult to tell what was shot on location and what was on stage.”
At one point, the bin trick swings around a corner and crashes through a glass guardrail in the middle of the road. Here, a crash camera down low was positioned to catch that angle. However, the bin swung slightly wide and took out the camera. “The whole crash box and camera took off and flew up through frame and then out top left of frame, with all the exploding glass and the bin behind it,” recalls Sloan. “We ended up getting rid of the camera in VFX, which involved painting out a lot of glass, putting a lot of glass in, replacing the bin, and replacing the bits of the framework for the glass that were occluded by the flying camera.”
The helicopter leap
The film concludes with a massive confrontation on the Metalstorm quarry set. It sees Colt leap onto a hovering helicopter and eventually fall below onto a crash mat, before the chopper crashes. “Special effects built an amazing helicopter buck which was suspended from a massive crane for when we were inside the helicopter with the characters,” explains Sloan. “They were hoisted up in the air and we shot a lot of those backgrounds as practical plates. Then some shots included adding windscreens and CG rotors and rotor flicker.”
Ultimately, Rising Sun Pictures (visual effects supervisor Matt Greig) would craft digital replicas of the helicopter, along with cars and the quarry environment, to build up the shots required. “For instance,” says Sloan, “when they’re coming up to it and the helicopter rises up in front of them, just before Colt gets swung off the camera arm, we made the decision to replace the practical chopper with a CG helicopter. Originally it was just meant to be hovering there, but having it just fly up into frame made it much cooler.”
“Rising Sun Pictures also added dozens and dozens and dozens of explosions to the third act, including pink and red dye dust explosions,” continues Sloan. “Those were these big dust explosions that had a fireball inside them.”
The moment Colt falls from the helicopter was a real stunt, and again one that Sloan says epitomized David Leitch’s overall approach to combining practical and digital on the film. “That’s one that we could have made bigger, we could have added more explosions to. But David said, ‘Don’t touch the stunt’. To the point where there’s quite a big continuity error in there that we didn’t fix, because it would’ve been touching one of the stunt guys. But it didn’t matter, it worked.”
VFX you might have missed
There are many more visual effects in the film not covered here, such as parts of the Sydney Harbour boat chase, a flashback to Colt filming a Vietnam War movie, and a stylized nightclub sequence arising from Colt having been drugged with hallucinogens, which was designed by Framestore and executed by Cinesite. Then there’s a raft of further invisible visual effects moments.
One of these relates to a car chase between the characters Dan Tucker (Winston Duke), and Colt and the actor he stunt doubles for, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). “The cars in this chase are silver and gold and black,” details Sloan, “but in the edit, it started getting too confusing between the black BMWs that the bad guys are driving and Dan’s original black car. So we replaced that car with a gold one, actually one that we’d already been making as an asset that we didn’t end up using. But then we had two gold cars, so we had to re-skin the gold car as a silver car. There’s a ton of work in there and nobody thinks twice about it.”
You might also be hard-pressed to spot a shot featuring a digital version of the dog Jean-Claude. This CG creature take-over was required for a particular action moment inside the cabin of a truck. Framestore had used a scan of the on-set dog to build up an asset, and suggested doing a test. “We did the test,” reveals VFX supervisor Chevallier, “and the only note that we received was about the framing of the background. This is how we love things, actually. We love being complementary with the practical shoot.”
Seamless visual effects work came in handy, too, for a scene that required the stitching of two plates together. While Sloan won’t identify the actual moment in the film, he initially thought it would not be doable. “I just couldn’t see how we were going to fix it–we ended up for the B side of the shot with absolutely no way we could get the camera in the same position as the A side ended. It was a big parallax shot. There was no bluescreen. It was really complex, in a big, very ornate building. The two shots just did not line up at all. All we could do was try and line up on this one element and know that we’re going to be roto’ing and changing the entire background in one of the sides. Framestore looked after that shot and worked on it for months, and it came out beautifully. And again, nobody knows!”
Finally, Sloan advises that some of the most invisible work was the painting out of signage, video screens and other banners around Sydney locations for licensing reasons. Meanwhile, on the Metalstorm set, bluescreens were actually ‘painted’ in. “It tickles me to reveal this, but we actually have some CG bluescreens in the movie. We added some of these into the background to give more of a sense of the movie set. That’s really meta.”
Read the full invisible effects issue of befores & afters magazine.
