Hollywoods Look! Effects has announced their work creating one of the signature effects for Renny Harlins film, DRIVEN, starring Sylvester Stallone. The visual, which recurs throughout the film, was part of a large package of effects created for the film by the digital boutique. Look! Effects' visual effects team worked directly with Harlin and visual effects supervisor Brian Jennings in developing the look of what became known as the Driver Vision effect. Suggestive of a driver's being "in the zone," the point of view shot indicates a transition from a normal view to a kind of surreal outlook where the center point of the frame -the racetrack- comes into razor sharp clarity, while objects on the periphery slow to a crawl. Look! Effects created Driver Vision effects for each of the three main drivers in the film. To create the final effect, the studio desaturated the colors, warped the edges of the frame with radial blur and ghosted in past frames as a means of distorting time. Originally intended for use three times in the picture, Driver Vision ultimately was employed in seven scenes and came to serve as a manifestation of the racing experience. The effects team was also charged with removing Stallone's character from a whole series of shots in order to accommodate a script change set in place after the scene was filmed. To accomplish the removal, artists restored missing parts of the frame by extracting elements from other frames, sampling textures and painting in what wasn't there.
