#moviestunts

So Fast & Furious 8 comes to theaters on April 14th, 2017 and the ninth and tenth films would be released on April 19, 2019 and April 2, 2021, respectively.

Have you ever wondered how they do all those crazy, dangerous and super cool stunts they have on all the The Fast and Furious movies?

No man I'm not talking about the CGI (Computer Generated Image) stuff mna. 

Felix Gary Gray is going to be the next man sitting on the franchise director sit. You will recognize his name from the credits of Set It Off 1996, The Italian Job 2003, Law Abiding Citizen 2009 and the recent Straight Out Of Compton. Now we wait and see what he has in store for us.

Out of all the franchise directors, Justin Lin has to be the craziest of them all when it came to the stunts. I mean la bhuti just took it to another level every time. He is the ultimate destruction-savant. 

He was quoted on screenrant.com saying “what I’ve learned is that [CGI] never replaces the real thing. There is something very special and unique when you crash a car”.

Mhmmm that might explain why he got to direct half the franchise, because at the end of the day, Fast and Furious is all about the adrenaline of the street racing, the speed,, the car chase and the car crash. Lin took over from John Singleton in 2006 and directed Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, up to Fast and the Furious 6 2013.

Now back to the stunts, lets start with the last movie Fast 7.

The stunt coordinators were Andy Gill and Joel Kramer and this is what they had to say about the stunts. “Now, everything may be choreographed, But it’s all real. There’s no cheating the audience. Our goal is to try to get as much in camera real as you can.”

 A total of 340 cars were used in the film and more than 230 cars were destroyed in the making of the film. The mountain-highway chase scene on Colorado's Monarch Pass proved to be the most damaging sequence with over 40 vehicles being destroyed. Only 10 percent of the action sequences in the film were computer-generated, and even then, much of the CGI was employed simply to erase the wires and other contraptions that were used to film real cars and drivers or to add a background.

While everybody was going on and on about the flying cars when the movie came out, my favorite stunt in the movie had to be that of the crashing bus. 

Surprisingly, one of the most insane stunts in the film was almost never filmed, because the whole thing was so crazy expensive to do that the producers almost backed out at the last minute in favor of CGI.

HOW?

There was no green screen, it was all done practically. Only the wires and safety harnesses had to be digitally erased.

For this scene, the filmmakers had almost no margin for error and only one shot at getting it right. After all, you can only crash a bus off a cliff so many times.

On action, they pushed the bus off the cliff. But first to begin, the crew bolted the bus in place with steel girding, securing it to the side of a cliff. With the bus secure, Paul Walker’s stunt double, wearing safety wires, began his run up the side.

For the next part of the sequence, three disparate things had to come together at exactly the right time: The bus had to slide off the cliff, Letty’s car had to spin close to the cliff’s edge, and Brian had to leap from the bus towards the car at   the very last second.

For safety reasons, the crew tethered Letty’s car with a 35-inch thick cable to the back, meant to stop the driver from accidentally spinning out over the actual cliff. As the driver moved down the road, the bus gets pushed off the cliff, and the stunt man, suspended six feet up and 15 feet out and hanging over a 160 feet drop, started his mad run up the side.

The entire sequence, filmed over the span of one week in a quarry outside Atlanta, Georgia, only ends up being a few minutes long, but is incredibly awesome and worth it. 

Ja neh! Timing is very important! No, actually timing is everything!

There’s a careful degree of planning and execution for each stunt. Gill estimates the 2nd unit stunt crew did about seven to eight months of work, with another four just for planning. The second unit director was Spiro Razatos..

Ok next up is the stunt that got everybody talking, the skydiving cars. I wasn't  really impressed though. Ok I was a little but I feel like we've already seen that before. However, what did catch my eye and impressed me, was the planning, preparation and the execution of the whole thing. 

HOW?

The "air drop" sequence was conceived by second unit director and stunt coordinator, Spiro Razatos, who also supervised on the franchise's two previous installments; Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6.

Over 10 cameras were used for the sequence. In addition to cameras on the ground, there were cameras remotely operated inside the plane and another three mounted outside each car. Additional cameras were on the helicopter, where Razatos was stationed watching monitors. Three skydivers used in the shoot wore helmet cameras to help shoot the sequence from multiple angles.

A 58-year-old Lockheed C-130 Hercules was used in the film to carry the vehicles that would drop from 12,000 feet high, above the Sonoran Desert, making cars plummet at a speed of about 130 to 140 miles per hour.

To get the cars to land safely, Gill and his crew got advice from the U.S. Army. They suggested the production team use military chutes with GPS systems. They tested them but didn't like the outcome because the aesthetic wasn’t what the film makers were going for. So the team movedd onto BRS chutes, smaller and more compact versions of military parachutes that are actually used for small airplanes. BRS chutes, also enabled with GPS, were secured to the cars before they were dropped 12,000 feet out of the C-130. At 5,000 feet, the chutes deployed.

Cameras needed to be mounted onto cars in a way that they would not be destroyed when the cars landed, and the crew had to figure out a safe way to get the cars out of the plane. They performed a dry run with a single car falling out of a plane and did this six times. Cars were dropped from the plane high above the Arizona desert, but close up shots that show the cars landing on a mountain road were filmed in Colorado. BRS parachutes enabled with GPS were secured to each of the cars before dropping off the C-130 plane. At about 5,000 feet, the parachutes deployed.

Sky divers would either jump out before cars or after them. While all the cars landed on their drop zones, 70% landed perfectly and 30% didn't For the close-up scenes which shows the actors inside their cars, a giant gimbal with a 360-degree range of movement were attached to each of the cars and was filmed against a green screen to reproduce their tumble through the sky. While Gill and Razatos were more than willing to drop cars out of a plane, they drew the line at drivers sitting inside the cars.

The last part of the scene, which shows the cars hitting the road was shot separately. To get that right, the team set up a pully system that had cars six to ten feet above the ground. When they were dropped from the cranes, the stuntmen who were sitting in the driver's seats raced their engines at about 35 to 40 miles per hour and slid to the ground at full speed. Those cranes were then later removed from the film with computers.

Tell me that was not impressive.

With the following stunt, Im still trying to figure out if it was more about the stunt itself or the car. 

The car is a Lykan HyperSport, a $3.4 million supercar with custom rubies and diamonds in its headlights and a gold-plated roof. It’s the only supercar produced in the Middle East, and there are only seven in existence. It is the most expensive car to feature in the Fast and Furious franchise. The HyperSport is powered by a Porsche-sourced, 3.7 liter, twin-turbocharged, flat-6-cylinder engine that's tuned to produce 750 horsepower. As a result, the hypercar is able to blitz the 0-60 mph run in just 2.8 seconds and reach an incredible top speed of 242 mph. 

See.....very easy to be in awe and get lost in all of that. To tell you the truth, that car didn't look real to me, but now I know better.

Now back to the stunt.

HOW?

Of course, the car didn’t crash through a building. 

“You’re not ever jumping a car from a real building” Gill said in one of his interviews. 

So, if the team couldn’t jump a car from building to building of the Etihad Towers in Abu Dhabi, they did the next best thing. They built 40 foot tall glass and steel enclosures inside a giant sound stage in Atlanta. Once that was complete, a stunt driver crashed at high speed through each “tower.

See how in the video below.

"SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING, I GOT A TANK ON MY ASS."  

Hahahaha who remembers this line in Fast 6? 

Nobody can make loud and panicked dialogue sound so smooth, sexy and funny as hell at the same time, like Tyrese Gibson does. Ohw sorry ma bad, that would be the character Roman Pearce.

*Ahem* let me behave and get back to the stunts.

HOW?

This part of Fast & Furious 6 was shot on the Canary Islands. The government officials pretty much issued him Justin Lin carte blanche to take over a major road and start blowing up everything in sight—from bridges to staged oncoming traffic—in the name of good cinema.

According to second unit director Spiro Razatos, that sequence was the hardest because they used real tanks, and if the tank hit something it was not supposed to hit, it's destroyed. And there is no forgiveness,

The marvelous Herculean vehicle is a custom-designed, pimped out battle tank that the Fast & Furious team tricked-out to drive 60 MPH—twice as fast as the original battle tank's top speed. The American Hero who drove the tank is Lee Millham, a highly regarded and award-winning stunt performer who also worked on The Dark Knight Rises, Snow White and the Huntsman, and World War Z.

This scene was originally intended to use CGI to portray the vehicle crushing cars along the highway, but the final scene used practical effects as the tank really ran over approximately 250 cars during filming. But the segment's finale that sees Roman leap to a nearby car and the tank flip was created digitally.

Check out the behind the scenes video below.

The first 17 seconds of the video....mhmmmm......He might as well been talking to me when he said  “Fix your face”......Thirst trap yodwa le!.....Enjoy!

Remember the flip car? More like a pimped out go kart if you ask me.

Lin tasked the film's vehicle designer Dennis McCarthy with developing a car capable of driving head first into moving vehicles and flipping them into the air. McCarthy and his team designed a fully functional, low to the ground, formula racing car with a ramp on its front that allowed it to catapult other cars into the air while keeping the Flip Car driver safe

HOW?

It's a mobile weapon, a beastly machine that attacks by flipping other cars over. For the actual movie, a cable and winch system is used to flip the cars and trucks to their fiery demises.

It took four weeks during August and September of 2012 to shoot the flip-car chase in the U.K. Over that time, the crew would capture about 300 individual shots and wreck about a dozen Vauxhall cop cars.

Traditional ramps made out of tubular steel trusses and under-car cannons launched the cars into the air. 

Some of the scenes were shot with up to 12 different cameras running, some of which were mounted to high-speed Porsche Cayenne, Cadillac Escalade, and Mercedes M-class high-speed camera cars. Cameras were also mounted to the action car and on cranes and dollies. Meanwhile, the actors were shot on a process stage in Middlesex, England, sitting in cars mounted against a green screen on multidirectional gimbals. They would be digitally inserted into the scene later.

Every single shot in this chase has been touched. They re-speeded some shots to give it a little bit of a boost, making it seem like the car’s moving faster.” The effects crew also digitally deleted camera cars from the background and camera rigs from the sides of cars. But not only were the camera cars and rigs removed, their reflections had to be digitally erased from surfaces, too.

And then last but not least we had the vault heist, car chase in Fast Five. 

HOW?

Six versions of the 8-foot high vault were built, each with specific uses. One of the vaults was a façade built onto the front of a semitruck and was used for filming close shots of the vault destroying street cars. Another vault was a reinforced, four-wheel self-drive vehicle that was connected to 30-foot cables and dragged through the streets of San Juan by the two stunt Dodge Chargers. The four-ton vault was driven by stunt driver Henry Kingi, who had to wear a temperature controlled suit to compensate for the temperatures within that could exceed 100 degrees. A scene where the vault tumbled as the cars rounded a corner was a practical effect, and the result was more violent than the filmmakers had anticipated. Over 200 vehicles were destroyed by the vault during filming. Several stunts had to be cut including a final scene that would have seen the vault hanging over the edge of the Teodoro Moscoso Bridge. This stunt was abandoned when it was determined that even the powerful Chargers would not be able to support the vault's weight.

The primary stand-in vault used was actually a shortened pick-up truck chassis with a vault-shaped case that fit over it. In essence the vault was a steerable single-driver mini-car hooked to Walker and Diesel’s cars to make it look like their characters were dragging it

Hayno if all this doesn't impress you, then I don’t know what will.

Exercise 2 a&b

I have seen every James Bond film ever made, not because they are particularly great movies but when you grow up with them you really have to see them all. 

One of the attractions for me has always been the opening credits and sound track, it was like with some anticipation of how the movie opened indicated what quality the movie would be.

Recently I saw the latest instalment ‘spectre’ and during my research, I came across this great article in FX Guide that gives up many of the stunts and effects used in the films creation.  

After watching the film and now seeing its secrets revealed it will be hard to watch film again in the same way. I mean you expect special effects to be used but knowing what is real and what is not is so blurred. 

The train scene is a good example, it is something that I would have thought required no effect at all, yet 3 carriages have been added, colour grading and other effects not been obvious. The discussion of the mouse scene for those who have seen the film is revealing, in that you like to think some of these things are possible. My naivety is showing, right?

This is the page link if anyone is interested which has quite a long and detailed explanation of many scenes, their stunts and effects.

https://www.fxguide.com/featured/spectre-acular-special-effects/ 

I am not sure how any of this will translate to my own project but it was interesting nonetheless.

This video is the major explosion scene and although it actually happens the treatment used in post production reveals not all is what it seems.