Sequences for the thriller, which stars Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins and is set completely within a high-tech SUV, include digital doubles, FX, environments, and complex greenscreen compositing.
PFX has shared with VFXWorld and AWN its visual effects work on the recently released thriller, Locked. The studio delivered 750 unique VFX shots, created over four months, that included digital doubles, FX, environments, and greenscreen compositing. The full-service post-production studio has operations in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Austria and Italy, with over 350 artists.
Starring Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins, directed by David Yarovesky and produced by Sam Raimi, Locked follows a young carjacker trapped in a high-tech SUV by a mysterious sociopath who wants to show him the consequences of his reckless lifestyle.
“This was our first time working with director David Yarovesky,” said Jindrich Cervenka, VFX supervisor at PFX. “He’s a highly technical filmmaker and had a great vision to differentiate this from other claustrophobic thrillers. He wanted to keep the audience engaged and build tension despite the limited location by using long-take cinematography. This meant building an SUV with removable pieces so multiple cameras could move in and around the car freely.”
The unique cinematography style resulted in several VFX challenges for PFX’s team, which consisted of 75 artists brought onto the project by distribution company Highland and executive producer Petr Jákl. Continuity was difficult to maintain, particularly for interior car scenes where different takes needed to be merged into one. A large portion of the shots also involved creating digital doubles of the background and SUV, as well as complex compositing to add backdrops behind car windows and remove reflections from the car’s surface.
PFX’s greatest challenge was a continuous 3.5-minute shot that introduces Skarsgård, who plays the young carjacker, as he steals the SUV from a parking lot at the start of the film.
“Because the sequence involved a parking lot with a busy urban background, filming on location would’ve made it extremely difficult to clean up all the distractions,” explained Cervenka. “We decided to use a greenscreen stage to maintain control.”
On the stage, six crew members disassembled and reassembled parts of the car in precisely choreographed movements, all while avoiding the eight RED cameras that captured 360-degree footage of the shot. To create a natural parallax, PFX’s artists placed the primary greenscreen six meters from the car, with another a few meters further away. The team used 3D Equalizer to create an accurate 3D track of the entire shot, including all the windows and mirrors.
For any parts of the sequence that couldn’t be achieved practically, the PFX team used Houdini to create a digital double of the SUV. PFX was also given a LiDAR scan of the real parking lot and 360-degree footage captured by the RED cameras, which they processed in Houdini. This was then used as the basis for a 3D scene that recreated the final background. As the final step, shots and background projections were all composited in Nuke, where the team also removed green spill and reflections from the cameras and crew.
An in-house tool called Crossbow was used to manage workloads across PFX’s Prague, Bratislava and Warsaw facilities by tracking shot continuity and organizing each artist’s tasks.
“This software continues to evolve with each project,” added Tomas Srovnal, VFX producer at PFX. “Even before Locked, it made workflows more efficient, but this project really put it to the test, especially with the tight timeline.”
Source: PFX
Journalist, antique shop owner, aspiring gemologist—L'Wren brings a diverse perspective to animation, where every frame reflects her varied passions.
