Speed VFX Review

Movie -  Speed
released - 1994
Director - Jan de Bont
Cinematography - Andrzej Bartkowiak 
VFX - Sony Pitures Imageworks

Speed is a 1994 movie about a remote terrorist hijack of a passenger bus. The movie unravels around a LAPD SWAT officer who had been met with the hijacker in a previous incident which is shown at the start of the movie. Keanu Reeves, Dennis Hopper, Sandra Bullock, Joe Morton, Alan Ruck, and Jeff Daniels play the major roles in SPEED. Despite it's rather straight forward story the movie went onto become a box office hit! & a sequel was made.

let's get to the visual effects of this. sorry guys, it has been some time since I wrote as a lot of things happening in my life, i will try to cover up the pending list soon. 1994 or the entire 90's had a lot of creative use of VFX in movies. practical effects were the trend & Computer generated imagery came into play hand in hand. This balance of Practical vs CGI effects played a major role in movie Visual effects looking believable compared to some recent movies that look way off the reality radar!
The elevator hijack scene with all the explosions & blowing was practical effects. they used air pumps & explosive stuff to fake the big explosions. If there were any CGI used, it must have been small touch ups. After this action packed SWAT sequence the story switches to the bus incident.

few days later the SWAT officer jack (keanu reeves) witnesses a bus exploding & is soon contacted by the bomber of the elevator incident. He is told that another bus rigged with a speed limit gauge is set to explode if it is slowed less than 50 MPH. so the main focus is set on the bus from this moment onwards.

Fun Fact! - The jumping scenes of jack from the car to the bus is actually performed by Keanu himself!

11 GM new look busses were used for the filming. 2 busses were used for the jump, one bus was cut in the front to film the inside shots, two busses were blown up, one bus was used for under the bus scenes & another for high speed scenes. 

For the bus jumping scene, a bus was specially prepared with special setup to safeguard the driver. Most film stunts that had vehicle jumps & crashes were ended causing spinal injuries & deaths to the drivers. so the movies safety crew prepared a special harness which suspended the driver in mid air, hanging him horizontally & vertically with elastics. The driver sat in the middle of the bus and a dummy was placed in the driver seat to fake it. most of the internals were removed to make it lighter so that it could fly in the air for longer & travel a long distance.

The missing 50 ft of road was later added (actually it was removed from the shots) using CGI. If you happened to have a copy of the movie watch for this scene and note the shadow of the road below. you will see the shadow of the highway continues even though the road is missing a whole 50 ft. 

Cameras are setup inside the bus by the bomber to make sure that everything goes as planned. all these footage that you see are actually shot and played on the movie set, and that was more than just creating a fake loop for the background computer screens. Hats off to the director & the crew for keeping it live.

The shots of the Metro redline used both 1/8 scale models & actual trains. A full scale model was built for the final sequence. The movie to date is a very good example of both scale model & practical effect usage. please leave a comment if you found this article useful. thank you.

The Shallows - Visual Effects VFX Review

Movie - The Shallows
released - 2016
Director - Jaume Collect-serra
Cinematography - Flavio Labiano
VFX - ILPVFX (Important Looking Pirates) - Shark CGI | VFX - ObliqueFX - Other VFX |
Digital Sandbox |  Scanline VFX | MPC | Lola VFX | Spin VFX | Aaron Kupferman | Mammal Studios

The Shallows is a 2016 survival thriller starring Blake Lively, steven Seagull (Actual seagull) & Mr.Bad guy Shark itself. This Movie is a must talk about Visual effects piece as it got VFX work done by over 14 or more Studios & individuals.

Spoiler Alert------------------- The movie revolves around an incident that occurs at a beach & the movie stays in the same beach for more than two thirds of the movie where it cuts to old memories & getting to the location via a truck in the opening. Nancy who is a medical school drop out (after her mothers death), comes to the very same beach her mother used to surf. the beach is a secluded location only visited by a few surfers.

As nancy get to the water & surfs most of the day without any incident, she is confronted by a shark as she makes her final approach to beach at the end of the day. From that point, until she frees her self from the giant deadly shark  a race for survival begins with a cunning monster in it's territory & an injured young female surfer stranded on an isolated rock with a wounded seagull!

Back to Visual effects-----

After researching, I got to know that more than 14 Visual effects studios / individuals worked on this movie. The final movie is nothing like Terminator or Transformers where you could guess the CGI is being played. From the start to the end, the scenery & the story takes you into another dimension with it's momentum building slowly & then becoming intense as the fight between the shark & the surfer becomes personal!

The location is real!  It was shot in Australia & majority of shots involving shark was shot in a tank with blue screens (they had to replace them green screens to blue! & we call it Blue Screen) :) a digital 360 of the real location was created in the computer & was used to fill in the back plates when needed.

The Seagull--------------------------- not CGI

when in the early development stages, the steven the seagull was proposed to be full CGI as they thought it would be impossible to train a bird which was tried to be domesticated. On a visit to the Australian beach side  Blake Lively had a chance to feed a bunch of seagulls & the experience led the director to use a real seagull on the movie. So the Seagull is a real living bird that is shown in the movie.

these two shots above shows how well the Visual effects (VFX) team pulled these off.  as the director states every scene has a shot of the actual location & then footage created with VFX, while watching the movie, you never feel as it was VFX! Kudos to the team effort here!

 This shot is just added so you know the scale of it! The VFX team had to map all the details, both near & far, to create backplates so that every angle the director required later in the pool, can be manipulated using what they have!

 Mr. Shark needs a lot (I mean a LOT) of attention from a VFX perspective! Important Looking Pirates is the one & only go to when it comes to sharks! they are well known for there realistic sharks in Kontiki! ILP VFX did a lot of research 7 studied a lot of shark footage to create a humongous shark the Director wanted! the size of the shark had it's limitations when it came to agility & the top speed & also how the body weight reacted in action sequences! 

 Thanks to the marvel of  affordable super computers compared to the days of jurassic park, the Studio was able to simulate all the effects, such as weighing of skin, water bubble simulations & fluid with caustics & refractions! which could tax a heavy rig with just a few frames! when you look at the final movie you never feel any of the elements off the visual choreography that is carried out throughout!

This shot (I want tell you which part) is enough for a person with a simple knowledge in computer to understand how the electronic number crunching machines of 1950s have evolved to aid in wonders that are dreamed with limitless human mind!

thanks for reading, leave a comment if you enjoyed my research, taking screen shots & creating GIFs..

Some more shots of the small crab models used & the shark and several stages of simulation..