Here are the scenes where Paul Walker was recreated to appear on Furious 7
Peter Jackson’s Visual Special Effects Company, WETA Digital, has finally revaled how they recreated the late Paul Walker for Furious 7, admitting that it was “barely possible”
How VFX digitally recreated Paul Walker on Furious 7
Paul Walker died tragically in November two years ago halfway through the filming of the seventh movie in the Fast & Furious franchise. But, when studio executives decided to keep Paul Walker in the movie instead of cutting him out of the production, VFX companies had no idea what to do. Initially, Joe Letteri, the visual effects supervisor, said the company had to use previous footage to create a digital actor.
‘It was barely possible last year when we did it,’ Joe explained. ‘We had to complete a performance – what Paul Walker would have done if he’d been able to continue.’
This means that the team had to use old footage of Paul Walker to create close-ups and full sequences as ‘anything else would have shortchanged his performance and the film.’
350 camera angles were created by WETA Digital who built a library of refrence pictures of Paul based on outtakes from earlier movies. However, Joe explained that those scenes had been filmed in particular lighting environments which were a major challenged for the VFX crew. So, WETA ‘essentially had to relight his performance’ digitally for each new scene.
They then used motion-capture techniques on Paul’s brothers Cody and Caleb, as well as actor JOhn Brotherton who was also starring in the movie and was a similar size to Paul, to build the digital models they needed for the movie.
Martin Hill, a VFX supervisor on the film also discussed how creating a ‘photo-real digital human who can believably move and act onscreen’ was an amazing challenge to create it.
Here are 6 scenes that VFX digitally recreated Paul Walker for Furious 7
Paul Walker was known to millions of fans and the character Brian O’Conner was just as important to the franchise as the cars in the movie. Furious 7 became a box office hit movie and is the fourth largest box office all time, right behind The Avengers, Titanic, and Avatar.
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