Double Negative - BAF

One of the events I had most been looking forward to finally arrived... A talk from the special effects company Double Negative!

A man called Nathan Ortiz came to talk to us about one of their most recent contributions to the film "Rush".
It's a story about two F1 drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda, and how they survived and dealt with a car crash in 1976 (a true story).

Ortiz started out by saying he's a fairly new employee, after studying computer science he eventually became the FX Technical Director for this film. As important as his role is, he described a piece of film as a shared painting, because everyone on the team adds bits to the picture to make it better.

The director to the film is Ron Howard, who evidently was inspired by Senna, and is a fan of the 70's, where health and safety wasn't as big of a deal as it is in today's world.

Howard would record the live action on the track/on set, some employees of Double Negative were on set as well to give him a hand, and so they could agree on what looked best. After the footage was captured the special effects team worked their magic on adding or removing parts to the film, to complete the image.
The cars were filmed at 50mph, so they could have some control over the cars, then sped them up in the editing room.
The track and surroundings were edited as well. Adding signs, barriers and crowds on stands, as well as removing the sand pits that now sit around the track, all adding to the "track flavour" of the 70's.

In order for the editing to be slightly easier, they had to shoot as much foreground as possible; after this they would use a technique called crowd duplication... it's pretty self explanatory but this made it easier to have control on set. To get the crowd duplicated, each person was filmed in front of a green screen from different angles, then the films were labeled and added appropriately.
Some green screens were involved, the fire was digitally manipulated and the sound was replaced to make it sound more "70's"... All of this took 1 rigger, 17 effects artists and 40 compositors to make the complete film... 7 effects artists were involved in completing the main crash! I'm not very surprised since hearing about the amount of work they had to do.

One of the tools they used to help them get the accuracy of the cars movements was a simulator. They had one which allowed the animators to physically feel like they are driving the cars being used in the film! They calculated and took the information from the game and put it onto Maya to animate.

There were particular aspects that were difficult to animate accurately, such as the tyres. Getting the right texture and speed of them proved more difficult to them then they originally thought! So to solve that problem they studied every aspect of the tyre, the way it moves etc. and showed the footage to an F1 consultant.

A similar scenario with the fire, there are lots of aspects to think about: the ember, smoke, damage, trail of fire, shadow, speed, and the actual fire itself! After shooting the original footage, Ortiz sketched over the scene to plan out where to add the effects.

So after starting shooting in August 2012, it's incredible that they managed to finish it so quickly! Heres the trailer:


This talk was one of my highlights of BAF; Ortiz was very informative and spoke a lot about the techniques used in this and other films, as well as showing us some exclusive clips of the editing process!