Fast and furious cars race through a virtual Japan in Tokyo Drift. All images courtesy of Rhythm & Hues. © NBC/Universal.

Released in 2001, The Fast and the Furious featured some 150 visual effects shots. Two years later, 2 Fast 2 Furious more than tripled the shot count. With The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (opening today, June 16, 2006), Universal Pictures is raising the bar even higher with no less than 768 visual effects shots. Some 10 vendors contributed to the project, including (in credits order): Hammerhead (206 shots), Rhythm & Hues (123), CIS Hollywood (172), CafeFX (58), Pacific Title (164), Illusion Arts (4), Industrial Light & Magic (2), Perpetual Motion Picture (19), Digital Backlot (4) and Hatch FX, who provided cliff extensions and a complete environment for six Hammerhead shots. Sixteen additional shots were created by Proof, the previsualization unit set up by overall visual effects supervisor Mike Wassel, a veteran of the first two movies. Coordinating the project with Wassel were vfx producer Crystal Dowd and vfx plate producer Lynn Gephart.

In the two previous movies, visual effects were often utilized to create impossible camera moves, and to simulate car stunts that were too dangerous to perform live. In the third movie, the requirements were completely different. “Director Justin Lin wanted the car races and action sequences to feel real,” Wassel recalls. “He avoided using the kind of impossible shots that we had in the first two movies. On this project, the main requirements of the visual effects were creating greenscreen composites for car interior shots, and also placing the action in Tokyo, Japan. Some of the car races take place in the Japanese capital, but it was impossible to have the streets closed down for our location shoot. So, we had to create the environment digitally, which became a huge challenge.”

With so much of the action featuring the characters driving around, it was of paramount importance to set up a methodology that could convincingly place the principal actors behind the steering wheel. Three different techniques were used. For some shots, the actors were photographed with a tow rig. In other shots, they were filmed manning a mock steering wheel, while a stunt man was driving the car from the other front seat. Finally, a large number of shots required the actors to be shot on a green screen. Most of the time, the cars were photographed without any window or windshield. They were later added in CG, with all the proper reflections. Special effects coordinator Matt Sweeney built an air casters rig that was able to float multiple car bodies on a large “dance floor” on the greenscreen stage. This gave the director very organic movement between the cars and the camera.

Visual effects combined with innovative camera moves accomplish adrenaline-filled shots.

The Wassel Rig
Wassel and his crew then set out to capture the background plates, using a newly designed rig. “On the first movie, we used a six-camera Circlevision system that captured the 240° of the environment, using 28mm lenses,” Wassel says. “On the second one, the rig comprised two VistaVision cameras equipped with 15mm lenses, which allowed us to shoot with a 200° field of view. For the third movie, the races were of a different kind. It was very important to the director to have the stunt drivers close to the camera. To this purpose, we designed a double array of three Arriflex 435 equipped with 20mm lenses, creating a 150° field of view per camera set. The nodal points using this system were separated by approximately six inches, while with the Vistavision rig, they were 30 inches apart. This enabled us to keep the perspective offset very small, and allowed objects to get very close to the camera, without parallax becoming a problem.”

Most of the race sequences were filmed with real drifters driving the cars. When the action proved impossible to capture in camera, CG cars were used. The real vehicles were LIDAR scanned, which allowed Hammerhead to build a very accurate 3D representation of each car. The models were then textured with still photographs of the real cars provided by production. The LIDAR data was shared between Hammerhead and Rhythm & Hues (R&H), both in charge of sequences necessitating CG cars. In particular, Hammerhead handled the “suicide run” sequence where two characters race down a treacherous mountain road at night. CG animation was used to show one of the cars flying off the cliff edge.