‘Furiosa’ Director George Miller Embraced More CG and AI in Latest Franchise Installment
Bill Desowitz
Thanks to photorealistic tech advancements, George Miller evolved his approach to VFX on the “Mad Max” franchise in the nine years since “Fury Road.” Which is why he was much more comfortable using CG in post on “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.” His thrilling stunt-driven chase sequences were shot in-camera with as many practical effects as possible, but CG enabled him to achieve greater dynamic energy while enhancing his stylized world-building.
Back from “Fury Road” was production VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson of DNEG, who was eager to play with a bigger digital toolbox. This not only encompassed more realistic fire, water, dust, and smoke but also allowed the VFX team to extend the Wasteland desert landscape and skies and embellish the newly created Gas Town and Bullet Town environments. Plus, they were able to replace or augment the iconic vehicles (especially the multitude of motorcycles) for the action set pieces.
“George has completely embraced the idea that CG is the way to go to build worlds and do whatever we need to do in post,” Jackson told IndieWire. “The [2,000] shot count was huge on ‘Fury Road’ [twice the number on ‘Furiosa’]. But the vast majority of the shots for the main action was practical, based on practical locations, and it was background, it was supportive, it was extending and enlarging the size of the cliffs or narrowing the canyon. But the Toxic Storm [a CG simulation] didn’t exist.
“And then ‘Furiosa’ is obviously the opposite end of the scale,” he continued, “where there’s still some pretty impressive live-action stunts and [special] effects, but really it leans much more heavily on visual effects across the board in both environments and foreground action.”
Jackson describes Miller’s process as making an animated film using live-action components, shot at 48 frames per second, which makes it easier to speed up or slow down the action. It’s not surprising when you consider the joy it gave the director to make the animated “Happy Feet.” “His approach is very much about building the film in post-production,” Jackson added. “He’s very concerned about where the audience is looking. There’s this clarity of vision for the one thing that is most important in that shot.
“He’s cutting bits out of one shot and putting them in another, re-timing and placing everything exactly where he wants it in the frame,” said Jackson. “It just happens that a lot of the material is filmed components. No one’s ever seen a film with so many re-times and so many adjustments to the re-times in every single shot.”
Jackson oversaw the work of DNEG, Framestore, Rising Sun Pictures, and Metaphysic (which used AI to synthetically build the “Fury Road” Bullet Farmer character played by the late Richard Carter). But he didn’t join the production until post, when Miller began piecing it together like a complex puzzle. Jackson’s primary task was to fill in the gaps and to provide a greater sense of dynamic movement to the action.
This was never more evident than in the bravura 15-minute “Stowaway to Nowhere” sequence, where raiders ambush the War Rig driven by Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) and Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy). It was led by action designer Guy Norris, who planned it in pre-production with Miller using his Proxi virtual production system (also called Toybox). This elaborate previs tool, which utilizes performance capture and real-time rendering of Unreal Engine, enabled them to plan the sequence’s 197 shots, filmed on 78 separate days in New South Wales, Australia, and at Fox Studios in Sydney.
With cameras mounted to vehicles continuously traveling up and down a 2.5 mile stretch of straight road, the sequence involved stunt-car drivers, motorcycle riders, and experts in explosives. However, given the abundance of high-end motorcycle crashes, they used rigging and mo-cap suits for safety, overlaying the data of the physical motion of the 3D avatars onto the actual stunt drivers.
“The thing we had to do most on that sequence was generating a feeling of movement,” Jackson said. “Because quite a lot of the components that were filmed were not moving in the way that felt real. So we were kind of sliding things around, and when some of the components were a bit further away, we were replacing them with CG to generate more movement.”
In some instances, the VFX team had to add the harpoons and open parachutes that attack the War Rig. “So largely all of the flying stuff was pretty much CG, apart from the pilots or the people where they were filmed elements for that,” Jackson added.
When it came to world building, the most CG attention was paid to Gas Town and Bullet Farm. In “Mad Max” lore, Gas Town sits on a flat plain area around an abandoned oil refinery. “The set they had for that had quite an extensive foreground build,” Jackson said. “The gates that they go through and the sort of front row of tanks and structure and a little bit of fence. So we were augmenting that and then filling in all of the oil refinery behind that. That was one of my favorite locations. I really liked the look of that. It was very stormy and over the top. The idea was that there was this sort of local weather system that hung around above this toxic oil refinery with dark clouds and the flames from the refinery.”
Bullet Farm, meanwhile, is a refurbished arms factory that sits in a quarry sunk into a large crater, which has a dirt road that circles the walls down into the central basin. It fuels the Citadel war effort against roaming gangs in the Wasteland. “It was a gravelly place where they were able to bulldoze some shapes onto the ground and build the main entrance gate and some of the surrounding walls,” Jackson continued. “They had a foreground component to the shoot and then all of the background, and we added the main gate. I really liked the Furiosa sniper rifle sequence. It’s all quite stylized and almost like caricatured action, the way she rides down and just misses being squashed by the chimney falling, and then throws the grappling hook, and [Jack] catches it and she slides.”
CG was also required for some nifty facial animation, given that two actresses played Furiosa — Alyla Browne as a child and teenager and Taylor-Joy as an adult. This consisted of seamlessly blending Taylor-Joy’s eyes with Browne’s with the use of AI. This was handled by Rising Sun Pictures using machine learning software. “We wanted to make Alyla’s eye shape more similar to the way that Anya might have looked when she was that age,” Jackson said. “We replaced a patch of her face, depending on the shot. In some of the closeup stuff, there’s quite a significant component that’s been modified. We also modified the look of Alyla to be slightly older towards the end.”
Conversely, the first few times we see Taylor-Joy, her eyes are made to look a bit more like Browne’s to smooth the transition. Jackson found the process effective because the software compiles and analyzes both sets of eyes (using footage from their previous performances) and then provides the desired result, replacing one set with the other.
“It’s more than just shape and color, it’s the whole performance,” he said. “But it has to fit, this mix between [the two] faces. It’s just a new tool that is more effective at capturing the performance and minute expressions than traditional CG face replacement techniques.”
