How PFX created a continuous 3.5-minute VFX shot for Locked
PFX has released its VFX breakdown of an unusual continuous three-and-a-half-minute shot from carjacking thriller Locked.
The precisely choreographed shot saw the VFX studio process the footage from a complex greenscreen shoot, creating digital doubles of the vehicle and its surrounding environment.
Creating a one-shot wonder
Locked follows a young carjacker trapped in a high-tech SUV by a mysterious sociopath who wants to show him the consequences of his lifestyle.
For PFX, the greatest technical challenge was the continuous 3.5-minute shot that introduces the carjacker (Bill Skarsgård) as he steals the SUV from a parking lot at the start of the film.
“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,” said VFX Supervisor Jindrich Cervenka. “We decided to use a greenscreen stage to maintain control.”
Choreographing the live shoot
Six crew members disassembled and reassembled parts of the car on the stage, avoiding the eight RED cameras that captured 360-degree footage of the shot.
To create a natural parallax, PFX’s artists placed the primary greenscreen six meters from the car, with another a few meters further away.
This made keeping track of Skarsgård and objects in the foreground tricky, so PFX used 3DEqualizer to create an accurate 3D track of the entire shot, including all the windows and mirrors, then matchmoved the shot to incorporate the car’s numerous moving parts.
Creating digital doubles of the SUV and surrounding environment
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 was processed in Houdini to create the 3D background for the scene.
As the final step, shots and background projections were composited in Nuke, where the team also removed green spill and reflections from the cameras and crew.
Part of over 750 shots created by PFX for the movie
In total, PFX delivered 750 VFX shots for Locked, created by a team of 75 artists from PFX’s Prague, Bratislava and Warsaw facilities over a period of four months.
To manage workloads across each location, PFX used Crossbow, its in-house tool, to organize each artist’s tasks.
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