An excerpt from befores & afters magazine. Plus, watch Framestore’s BRAND NEW visual effects breakdown video.
Prior to Joshua crashing spectacularly in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, he is advised by Sonny to remain on slick tires, even in the wet conditions. The Monza track was, for several reasons, one of the most challenging for the visual effects team, owing to factors such as the actor strikes, track availability and digital water simulation.
When production first began shooting for the Monza scenes in Italy, the actor strikes were underway, which meant the cast could not film. Stunt scenes were undertaken, with the plan to return to Monza the following year. However, scheduling of the Monza race and a re-paving of the entire track meant that a second round of filming there could not take place. “So,” says F1 visual effects supervisor Ryan Tudhope, “we shot all of the cast stuff that we needed at Silverstone instead. We shot Silverstone for Monza and then relied on the array vehicle and scanning done in Italy to create a digital version of the Monza backgrounds. We’d use these to replace what we shot at Silverstone with Monza environments.”
The actors were filmed in Silverstone using an SFX wet rig devised by special effects supervisor Keith Dawson. It was effectively a buck, almost like a process trailer, that could be driven around the track with water spray able to be added onto the driver to capture in-camera.
The next issue was the wet track and rain. It did not rain when shooting took place in Italy. “What we did shoot there were a lot of shots after the sun had gone over the horizon,” explores Tudhope. “That gave us a blue dome light and no direct sunlight. From there, we were able to add a digital wet-down and digital water spray and rain and augment from there. With our CG version of Monza that was going into the Silverstone material, we obviously had to make that look wet and add rain.”
Editor Stephen Mirrione had curated pieces of reference footage from Monza of rainy race meetings. However, notes Tudhope, it had rained there quite a few years ago and a lot had changed in terms of car designs and with the track itself. “It was still Monza with cars going around a wet track and so it gave us another foundation that we augmented to make it look like modern day when we put our cars into it. That all meant Monza had all the techniques you could think of to pull it altogether.”
In terms of the wet track, producer Lewis Hamilton advised that initial visual effects shots featuring significant water spray and wet-downs were, in fact, too wet. “He just said they would not be able to drive in that on slicks,” relates Tudhope. “There were actually countless ways that he influenced the film, beyond that one example, but that was a good one to get as a VFX note to scale everything back and to try to find the sweet spot of just the right amount of wet that could be dangerous and a little crazy, but not impossible.”
For Framestore, adding rain, wet-downs and water spray meant covering a wide gamut of fluid simulations, as Framestore VFX supervisor Nicolas Chevallier breaks down. “When you want to add rain, it is not only a few droplets in the sky, we also sim droplets on the cars and add the rooster tails, for example. These could not be 2D elements, since it all had to move with the camera. We would gather reference to see how droplets moved or vibrated on the car, depending on the speed. The road needed to have a wet finish and be slightly reflective as well.”
Since action obtained in Silverstone was re-purposed for Monza, that also meant Framestore was required to swap array footage from one racetrack to the other. Re-projection techniques were utilized for the task. “We came up with a very precise process where you would have a plate with a specific action— say a cockpit shot looking at the main talent, either Joshua or Brad—and taking their performance from the Silverstone track, but using it for Monza,” explains Chevallier. “We had to replace the whole environment around them. We needed to find the right portion of the footage for continuity for where they needed to be to actually make sense for where they were on the racetrack. Then there were also a whole set of steps for tracking and matching the backgrounds and lensing, and dealing with reflections, and on top of all that, accounting for the wet track.”
