See how PFX crafted visual effects for the film in this breakdown. The Anthony Hopkins film Locked is set inside a car, and sees the camera sweep in and around the vehicle. To make this kind of action, production filmed an SUV on a soundstage with removable pieces that allowed for the camera to move in and out for large long-takes. PFX crafted 750 VFX shots for the film. You can watch their VFX breakdown, below. Plus, I’ve included portions of a release which describes the work. For PFX’s team — who were brought onto the project by distribution company Highland and executive producer Petr Jákl after working together on “Land of Bad” last year — this cinematography style resulted in several VFX challenges. Continuity was difficult to maintain as even small changes could affect several shots, particularly for interior car scenes where different takes needed to be merged into one. A large portion of the shots also involved creating digital doubles of the background and SUV, as well as complex compositing to add backdrops behind car windows and remove reflections from the car’s surface. Besides the sheer volume of work, PFX’s greatest challenge was a continuous 3.5-minute shot that introduces Skarsgård, who plays the young carjacker, as he steals the SUV from a parking lot at the start of the film. The sequence was crucial for the feature’s ramping tension. “Because the sequence involved a parking lot with a busy urban background, filming on location would’ve made it extremely difficult to clean up all the distractions,” says Cervenka. “We decided to use a green screen stage to maintain control.” On the green screen stage, six crew members disassembled and reassembled parts of the car in precisely choreographed movements, all while avoiding the eight RED cameras that captured 360-degree footage of the shot. To create a natural parallax, PFX’s artists placed the primary green screen six meters from the car, with another a few meters further away. This made keeping track of Skarsgård and objects in the foreground tricky, however, so the team used 3D Equalizer to create an accurate 3D track of the entire shot, including all the windows and mirrors. PFX then painstakingly matchmoved the shot to incorporate the car’s numerous moving parts. For any parts of the sequence that couldn’t be achieved practically, the PFX team used Houdini to create a digital double of the SUV. PFX was also given a LiDAR scan of the real-life parking lot and 360-degree footage captured by the RED cameras, which they processed in Houdini. This was then used as the basis for a 3D scene that recreated the final background. As the final step, shots and background projections were all composited in Nuke, where the team also removed green spill and reflections from the cameras and crew. The post Check out the fun way ‘Locked’ was filmed using a SUV mockup with removable pieces appeared first on befores & afters.