How The Penguin’s driving plates included footage from driving around in the video game, ‘Gotham Knights’. An excerpt from issue #29 of befores & afters magazine.
The Penguin features a vast amount of driving scenes, which VFX helped to complete via plate shoots and even a virtual driving solution based on a video game. “We really tried to really distinctly say we’re going from point A to point B, to be clear about the geography,” remarks visual effects supervisor Johnny Han. “I said, ‘Let’s buy the biggest maps we can get.’ We put on the wall the five boroughs of New York. We knew we were going to shoot somewhere in these five boroughs. This is before we even knew exactly where our shooting locations would be. But we wanted to be ready to know where to shoot paths for our driving plates.”
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The can-do attitude of the on-set VFX team came into play as a preparation stage before final driving plates would be filmed, as Han explains. “Our PA had a production rental car, and all we did was strap an Insta360 camera on top. Then we waited until it was about 5pm in New York, when it got dark in wintertime, and we tried out some routes. Basically we were shooting 360 degree video. Erin Sullivan, our VFX editor, put it all together, and then we’d show everyone. She cut it to time with text at the bottom that represented the dialogue to get the pacing right. We would get sign-off from executive producer Craig Zobel and Lauren in terms of tone, neighborhood and speed of car. We even acted out parts of the scenes, like, there’s a moment in the script where they would stop at a red light and Oz throws a phone out the window. So, we actually integrated those beats into our driving footage.”
When it came time to shoot the real plates, PlatePros was enlisted to drive those predetermined paths and shoot with their multi-camera array. The resulting plates were then played back predominantly at ZeroSpace (with some car scenes done at Carstage) for scenes of actors inside vehicles.
Then, in addition to these live-action plates where New York locations stood in for Gotham, some further driving scenes were realized that were virtual. “For some scenes,” says Han, “we needed a bit more of a richer Gotham, something that felt a little bit more like we’re in the city. It can be too hard sometimes to get plates in Manhattan because it’s just too crowded. So, we had this idea related to the video game, Gotham Knights.”
The idea was to take the open world game in the Batman ecosystem—which, like HBO, fell under the Warner Bros. Discovery group of companies—and collaborate in terms of rendered out driving plates that would again be played at Carstage. “We got a PlayStation 5 and took screengrabs of certain moments as we drove along in the open world,” explains Han. “Then we asked Warner Bros. Games to render out gameplay through these driving paths via nine different cameras, as if they were driving plates. They had never done anything like this, and thus were so excited and eager to contribute.”
That process involved some reverse-engineering starting with the multi-camera array live-action results from PlatePros, and then replicating the lens values, height of the ground and angles for the game footage. “We ran into an interesting problem where,” describes Han, “there were some non-deterministic aspects of the game, which is typical of game engines. Some of the traffic lights are randomized or people crossing the streets are randomized. Or, FX like steam from pipes, if you played it twice, it’s never exactly the same. We also had them turn off the lens flares from lamp posts as those were the kinds of things that would happen optically once we shot the actual scenes.”
One major benefit of the approach was that the ‘plates’ could be orchestrated into a perfect loop. “Since it’s a game,” notes Han, “we could link in right to the start of the path, so that you had this endless driving plate. In usual driving plates, this is actually often a problem. You never know when you’re going to hit the end of your footage from traditional driving plates. You might be in the middle of an important line but then you see the background switch. That was one nice thing we avoided.”
