‘Furiosa’ VFX Supervisor Andrew Jackson on Film’s “Groundbreaking” 1,347 Visual Effects Shots
While a staggering amount of what audiences see in director George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is computer-generated, it’s all grounded in reality.
“It’s a fantasy world, but the physics are always real,” explains VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson. “I’m not particularly interested in films where suddenly magical things can happen. I love to be in a world where we can film or photograph something and say, ‘That’s reality. That’s how this thing needs to behave or work.’ George is absolutely in that world.”
Although Furiosa was omitted from the Oscars VFX shortlist, the film is still vying for a spot on the Visual Effects Society’s nominations list, which will be revealed on Jan. 14. (“My team and I were honored to be among the considered films across this year’s awards for our work on Furiosa,” Jackson says when asked about the omission. “We wish all of the artists recognized on the Academy’s shortlisted films the best of luck.”)
The VFX work on Furiosa is remarkable. The origin story of renegade warrior Furiosa, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, includes 1,400 shots, 1,347 of which are VFX. Rather than starting from scratch, the DNEG team reused the library of 200,000 images assembled for effects work on Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road.
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“We were rebuilding worlds using that photographic material,” Jackson says. “We didn’t reuse CG assets from the previous film, so everything was rebuilt, including the Citadel. That was the one thing we might have been able to reuse, but we couldn’t access those files.” Another reason the team couldn’t recycle the almost decade-old CG assets was because of compatibility issues with current software.
Along with the Bullet Farm and Gas Town, The Citadel, the stronghold of villainous Immortan Joe, is one of Furiosa‘s star locations.
“On Mad Max: Fury Road, I took a helicopter to the Blue Mountains, which are just outside Sydney, and we flew backward across the cliff wall that is 200 meters tall,” he recalls. “We were taking detailed high-resolution images of that sandstone wall, which is essentially the Citadel. We used that cliff, wrapped it around, and built the whole thing out.”
Even though Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga includes a plethora of set pieces, many playing out on an epic scale, some of the biggest shots were not the biggest challenges, says Jackson, whose previous work includes Tenet, Dunkirk and Oppenheimer for writer-director Christopher Nolan.
“Probably one of the biggest challenges was that the shoot was plagued by terrible weather, including the Bullet Farm scene. It was supposed to be hot and sunny, and some days it was raining, overcast and cloudy,” Jackson reveals. “We had material from every kind of weather and were trying to put all those together into a scene so it felt like it was all shot in the same world.”
The process involved making “an impromptu studio in the desert” so they could light things more effectively.
“We had vehicles that were static and did what we call Simtrav, which is short for simulated travel,” he explains. “We put the vehicles on airbags so they bounce around, and the camera moves. It needs to be done in a very controlled way so that when you put in the moving background, it feels live. We had some challenging shots where things were not as dynamic and exciting as possible. They were in a tent with lights on them, and we had to try and make that feel like real daylight.”
Even the War Rig, a custom tanker driven by Furiosa and Tom Burke’s Praetorian Jack, was a problem due to its extremely shiny surface.
“You couldn’t pick a worse thing for the visual effects department than to make your main subject reflective,” Jackson muses with a laugh. “You can’t not fix it because you see reflections of things like all the crew. We had a CG War Rig that was tracked onto the filmed one so we could map the right images into those reflective areas. It’s not particularly difficult, but it’s a lot when that’s one of the main subjects in the film.”
Another tricky surface Jackson had to contend with was the CG-generated oil in the moats at Gas Town.
“We’re lucky because it was very thick and didn’t move,” the VFX supervisor recalls. “There was no wind or rippling surface like water. We used a reference from the Gulf War, where the oil fields had been destroyed, and oil was spilling out into big, flat, gloopy ponds in the desert. It was about finding the right level of reflectivity.”
They added “a dusty layer of stuff” that was sitting and floating on top of the oil so that it didn’t feel “completely uniform.”
However, one of the film’s biggest VFX achievements is the face replacement work on the young Furiosa, played by Alyla Browne.
“We modified her facial features to more closely resemble what Anya would have looked like as a child,” Jackson enthuses. “We generated a whole new face, and then in compositing, isolated the areas we wanted to change and kept other bits so all of the performance came from Alyla.”
That involved a machine learning process, in which the VFX team trained the model on the young actress and photographs of a young Taylor-Joy, so the tool could generate a new face “based on the performance and lighting and conditions of the footage along with the features from the training.”
“That technology is very new and didn’t exist ten years ago,” he concludes. “It’s groundbreaking technology, and machine learning tools are going to impact our industry more and more, hopefully in a positive way. They’re going to make tasks that are incredibly laborious right now more effective, which will free us up to do more creative things. Rotoscoping, tracking, and match-moving cameras, all of those tasks are going to become more automated and hopefully more accurate because of the new technology.”
