- This film is just sort of wall-to-wall action.
- I've always been a big fan of chasing new technology
and figuring out ways to create moments or experiences
or shots that we haven't seen before.
- I'm Ryan Gosling and we're about to go Behind The FX
of The Gray Man.
(intense music)
I've never made an action film on this scale
and what sort of blew me away was
just the amount of people involved
and just the amount of work that goes into this
before I ever come on set.
- It's probably the biggest scene
for visual effects in the movie.
It took all of a year and nine months to do.
All the interiors are practical replication
of the C-130 interior built onto a rocker gimbal
so the whole thing does a little bit of rocking
while we're in it.
Joe and Anthony Russo really wanted to make the scene
feel chaotic, so we blew up one of the engines
and then started ripping off the panels of the plane.
So on our set gimbal we took off all of the panels
and then replaced them with just sort of a black duvetyne
so that as the CG panels were coming off on set
we would rip a duvetyne panel off
and light would flood in the plane.
And then we really rolled the camera around
and we rolled the whole plane around
to really feel like it was in deep, deep trouble.
- We used a couple of techniques to execute that sequence,
one of which was an LED Volume Capture to capture
Ryan's body, the body of the stunt players
who were also going out of the plane with him.
- And it's a cylindrical shape of LED panels
with 160 cameras pointing inside the LED panels.
It's probably 12 or 15 feet tall
and there's a treadmill built into the floor.
And then we can play back the environment
so that it lights Ryan
and what the 160 cameras does for us is make a
photogrammetry per-frame mesh
of Ryan's entire body and his face.
- Which basically Photoreal captures Ryan's face
and allows us to put that on a digi-double
as he's falling through the air.
So you're really seeing Ryan's face and Ryan's reactions
and Ryan's emotions as if he were really
falling through the air.
(gun shots and glass breaking)
- We started way, way early in pre-production
for the trolley sequence doing storyboards.
Then we did Previz.
Then we did TechViz to help design
what vehicles needed to be built.
- You have an actual trolley that runs on tracks
through Prague that we used.
We had a bus rebuilt to look exactly like the trolley
but ran on tires for shots
where we needed to move the tram at speeds
that a tram couldn't achieve.
We had a standing set of the tram built
that can be shook so that it had vibration to it
but it was stationary and it had blue screen around it.
- So all of the fighting that was done inside the trolley
was done on a motion base in Prague
and pretty much all of the exterior trolley shots
are enhanced with CGs,
but all of the vehicles surrounding the trolley
are all practical, stunt-driven cars,
exploding, getting hit.
- There's a camera we're using on this one called a PogoCam,
which is basically a camera at the end of a long stick.
And there's basically boom operators holding the stick.
And then there's someone sitting there with a remote head
that's operating the remote head on the camera.
That was really unique.
We used that quite a bit on the tram
because it was very narrow
and it allows you to get to angles
that you normally couldn't get to with the human operator.
And it adds a really visceral dynamic quality.
- What do you say we wrap this up?
I mean, I'm having a blast
but it's way past the kids' bedtime.
- There's a lot of gunfire, a lot of gun fighting,
and it was at night,
which makes for a tricky scenario with muzzle flashes,
in that you want it to interact with the people.
Early on in pre-production actually I asked Steve Windon
and his team - Steve Windon is our DP.
They came up with this attachment that goes on the prop guns
that's connected to the trigger of the prop guns
so when you pull the trigger,
it fires a little burst of light.
When you're shooting a scene at night
and you're shooting with guns
that make big interactive flashes,
the actors' faces should be brightly lit, just a quick beat.
So this LED device that Steve made was very handy for them.
Claire and Six jump off the castle wall.
That was accomplished with primarily stunts.
- They were jumped on wires.
So at the actual location, that moat that was around it
was really only two or three feet deep.
And we have a decelerator.
When somebody leaps and we need to save them,
we decelerate it.
We built a replica of the same height on our stage
and had cameras down in the water
to get the leap of the same height into the tank,
without the safety cables.
- They found some kind of inflatable pool somewhere nearby
and we hopped in and hopped out.
So they made us look pretty cool again,
but you know the lion's share of that was done
by much more talented people.
(intense music)
Make sure to check out The Gray Man only on Netflix.