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.