DNEG’s Work
Fast & Furious, directed by Justin Lin, heads back to the streets where it all began in the original movie, The Fast and the Furious, and sees Dom Toretto reunited with Brian O’Connor to confront a shared enemy. The film’s Visual Effects Supervisor, Michael J. Wassel, returned to DNEG having worked with us last year to provide the VFX for Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
Led by DNEG’s VFX Supervisor Frazer Churchill, VFX Producer Moriah Etherington-Sparks, CG Supervisor Jordan Kirk, and 2D Supervisor Jon Bowen, the DNEG team primarily worked on the tunnel sequences. The main action took place in the tunnels of an abandoned mine shaft used by a gang of drugs smugglers.
“Car chases in abandoned mine shafts are not easy to come up with!” says Churchill. “There aren’t any shafts where you can film this kind of thing, so an environment was needed. As you would expect the cars are the real stars of the film, so rather than doing the whole sequence in CG, it was decided to shoot the cars as live-action and simulate the tunnel environment around them, so the entire environment was recreated in CG.” The build took two months to complete and between 2 and 3,000 feet of digital tunnel were created.
