Including filming actors on a bluescreen rotisserie rig.Its the scene everyone is talking about. Director Jaume Collet-Serras Carry-On features an intense action moment when LAPD detective Elena Cole (Danielle Deadwyler) is in a car en route to LAX airport with DHS agent John Alcott (Logan Marshall-Green), when she realizes the agent is an imposter.The resulting scuffle results in gunfire, near misses with many vehicles and eventually the car crashing and tumbling over, before Cole is able to shoot Alcott dead while they remain upside downwith the entire action playing out all from inside the car and all in one long oner.The visual effects for this dramatic scene was orchestrated by Wt FX, under visual effects supervisor Sheldon Stopsack. The studio and Stopsack had previously worked with Collet-Serra on Black Adam. When we were doing some additional shooting on that movie, recounts Stopsack, Jaume mentioned Carry-On and that he wanted to try something new, which was this car chase sequence. He described it to me on-set and he was wondering how one would go about doing it.Planning the onerThe car crash would ultimately be filmed with the actors in a partial car buck set against bluescreen, with Wt FX building the world, the vehicles and even the inside parts of the car around the characters. To get there, Day For Nite started by previsualizing the oner. If you go back now and look at it, shares Stopsack, you can literally take the shot, take the previs and play it side by side and theres so many similarities. Theres so many things that were established really early on.Early on, too, stunt coordinator and second unit supervisor Dave Macomber helped plan out the scene. He and his team jumped into Xsen suits and into a car mock-up and captured their motion, outlines Stopsack. Then he put that into Unreal Engine and they previsualized this themselves.These efforts aided Wt FX in realizing that there would be a great deal of action happening outside of the car, as well as everything going on inside the car, with moments of cross-over. To help establish what would be outside the vehicle (ie. the roadway, landscape, other vehicles), the team began a scouting phase. The scene takes place on the I-105 Interstate Highway in Los Angeles, says Stopsack. We said, Lets go on Google Maps and Street View and lets see what takes us down the road.It was also about working out speeds, adds Wt FX visual effects sequence supervisor Ben Warner. We had to work out, how much freeway do you actually travel in that amount of time, and how speed indicates the travel. For as much as it feels like youre traveling a long distance, they actually dont travel that far in the end, only about a 2.5 kilometer stretch.Shooting an array in LAThat scouting process was also done in preparation for a camera array shoot of the highway, the results of which would inform the backgrounds created by Wt FX. We would literally have a car go down that interstate to capture panoramic footage, explains Stopsack. Production hired a car with a video team that had Blackmagic cameras mounted on top of the car, capturing panoramic footage for us to stitch together.When the array footage was being captured, a front-mounted GPS was also installed. It meant you could see what they were seeing at the front of the car, notes Warner. You could match it up with the array but you could also match up the GPS locations. We could use that to always work out where we lived on the freeway and where we wanted to end up. It was somewhat important to have that GPS information, continues Stopsack, because when we shot the array footage, we traveled down at a reasonably consistent speed to have a reasonably steady capture of the stretch of the highway. But with the action beats of the actual Dodge Charger car going down, it wouldve gone with a different speed. So we roughly needed to know how to re-time that footage in order to get us to the geography that we were in based on the speed of the travel of the car in the film. It was an exercise of knowing exactly where it was captured and at what speed it was captured.One interesting aspect of the array shoot was how to manage the traffic on the highway during the shoot. You cant just lock down a 2.5 kilometer stretch leading up to LAX, points out Stopsack. But the highway patrol was kind enough to allow us to drive down it and keep the traffic as far away as possible. They couldnt stop the traffic and lock it off all together, which made for some interesting footage because you had the on and off ramps and sometimes there were cars coming from the on ramp and then the highway patrol blocking them off.Filming the actorsPrincipal photography of the actors on bluescreen made use of a specially-designed car rig, and a Technocrane for shooting, advises Stopsack. We broke down the whole shot into four beats, effectively. Its worth noting that the original plan was for the oner to be a lot longer, with a whole back section where Cole lowers herself out of the seatbelt, crawls out of the car, stops another car and drives off, again, all in the oner. Things were shortened for editorial reasons. The original four beats were, everything leading up to the crash, the crash itself, the post-crash moment with them being upside down, and then Elena crawling out. Breaking it down into these manageable chunks allowed us to target how we were going to shoot it.Everything leading up to the crash was a very well orchestrated stunt performance with Dave Macomber taking the lead there and really hitting the beats, adds Stopsack. They shot this on a bluescreen stage with what we called the rotisserie, which was basically a skeleton of a Dodge Charger mounted onto an absolute beast of a steel metal frame, which weighed a ton. It was mounted in a way that the car could effectively roll over. We had control over it to suggest leaning angles and which side of the car would be swerving. For the crash itself, we could flip it upside down. Indeed, we shot a whole portion of the crash with them literally being rolled over two and a half times with our actors in there flailing their arms.During the crash, the car comes incredibly close to other vehicles; at one point another cars side mirror smashes into the side of Cole and Alcotts cara gag achieved on set with a bluescreen-covered mirror prop that would later be replaced by a CG one. That coordination on set was all Dave Macomber and his stunt team, says Stopsack. The actors had to rehearse all this a few times. Dave would be sitting on a ladder in front of the car on the rotisserie rig, slightly elevated, yelling the beats. It was actually quite the dance because the camera team needed to do its thing, the actors needed to do their thing, and the stunt team was yelling the beats at them. View this post on InstagramA post shared by Netflix Geeked (@netflixgeeked)Assembling the shotEditorial brought together the different takes from the bluescreen shoot, with Wt FX then responsible for figuring out how to seam it altogether. We took on the footage and tried to exactly figure this puzzle out ourselves, says Stopsack. Takeover points was a big one to consider. We also started to figure out how to orchestrate the beats that then affect the world around them. Again, theres the inside world and the outside world, and for this we had an approach called a local space workflow. We tracked everything that happened on stage, including the movement of the buck and the movement of the actors. We were supported by our on-set team here, who came along for the shoot and they provided us with a stereo rig that was mounted to the hero principal camera. It was a similar approach to what was used on Avatar: The Way of Water where an additional stereo pair was shot.This was very useful for us, continues Stopsack, because it allowed us to not only get effectively a camera track from it, but we could also get some spatial awareness of what was happening in front of us. We had our actors in the car and we effectively could generate a mesh from that. We utilized that on our end to determine, say, when is the arm in the right spot for a takeover, or, is the car leaning left and what does it do exactly?Once everything had been stitched and blended together, artists lined up the local space to what was needed for the highway. We still needed to cater for the world outside of the car, says Stopsack. This is where our animation team kicked in who did a lot of the orchestration of the traffic outside. They needed to work towards all those timings wed already established. So, again, the dance continued because a lot of these pieces just needed to continuously be orchestrated.We spent a lot of time taking that local space camera and putting it into the world space, notes Warner. Theres a moment where they cross over onto the other side of the road. Geographically, we knew where they needed to end up. When we backed it up to where they crossed, that point crossing was where the roads were split on two bridges. There were a lot of timing considerations to make sure that when they did cross, they actually were crossing where the roads would actually make sense in terms of the geography that we were using. There was a lot of time spent upfront just making sure all those beats, both the internal and external, were all hitting the same thing. The action inside the carWith the camera moving around a great deal, and with the car buck only being a portion of the vehicle, Wt FX would ultimately replace much of the car interior with a digital version. The brief was, the camera had to stay inside the car, states Warner. Jaume really didnt want a notion of a camera coming in through the window and out the other side. He wanted to keep it internal. One of the big things we had to do was replace the roof. Now, when people are in cars, they shadow from the top and that was something we had to adjust.The seats are replaced almost the entire time, too, says Stopsack. Then theres the dashboard. The interior of the car was probably the most advanced interior that has ever been built here at Wt. A little Easter egg is, try to see if you can spot what radio channel theyre listening to, its playing Wt FM.For the roll-over crash moment, not only was the car interior digital, so too were the characters inside the car. That helped us transition from the first part of the crash to go into an all-digital portion with all-digital characters, describes Stopsack. Then when it ends with them upside down, we transition to the live-action actors hanging in the rotisserie rig upside down. For our digital doubles, we even adapted the facial rigs and facial system used on The Way of Water, which is our Anatomical Plausible Facial System (APFS).Breaking windshield and window glass and then small tumbling pieces of glass were a feature of the roll-over. Wt FX began with a physics-based simulation, says Stopsack. However, youd be surprised how physics doesnt want to give you what you want to see. We ended up cheating there a little bit, more in favor of creating the chaos and the violence and the energy.Stopsack and Warner credit compositor Robert Hall with leading the compositing of the oner. Says Warner: Rob picked and chose where we used the CG, where we used the plate. He found the blend points. He found what was the best solution. It wasnt always CG. It wasnt always plate. It really wasnt a traditional comp. Luckily, he had an input early on about how it was all going to come together, which was nice.The action outside the carFor the outside roadway, the array footage became a starting backdrop for Wt FXs CG highway build. This included all the roadway paraphernalia, side walls, barrels and, of course, other vehicles. Effectively, reveals Warner, Wt FX had to animate everything all twice by first making the scene work on the inside of the car, and then making the outside scenes support what was happening inside. Theres a whole other story being told on the outside! says Warner. Bringing those two together into one continuous thing was fun.At one point, a truck flips in front of the now out-of-control car. Eagle-eyed viewers may have caught that the moment the truck begins edging sideways matches up to a gunshot coming from inside the car, as Stopsack describes. Cole is fighting with Alcott, and Cole has a gun in her hand, Alcott smashes her hand and a shot goes off. Theres a muzzle flash that pierces a hole in the windshield which triggers a tire to be punctured in the truck in front of them, which is why it starts flipping over.If you look for it, says Warner, youll see the tire really goes pop, and that it goes pop maybe two or three frames after the muzzle flash goes off. Then we found the most amazing amount of reference on YouTube for exploding tires, and airbagsall sorts of crazy crashes, says Warner. We just made it bigger and bigger until everything basically explodes. The post How that crazy car crash oner in Carry-On was made appeared first on befores & afters.