When Paul Walker died two years ago in a car accident, his final performance in Fast & Furious was unfinished. Director James Wan was given the difficult task of figuring out how best to finish the movie without Walker. Even if you are the most hardcore F&F fan struggled to tell which scenes in the last film were created with CGI.
When the film came out earlier this year, producers were silent on which scenes were VFX and which were really him, but now new images have been released showing the exact scenes featuring a digital Paul Walker.
The studio who created the VFX, Weta Digital has also revealed how they used new technology to finish Walker’s performance. Joe Letteri, their senior VFX supervisor, said that the company ended up doing a staggering 350 shots going through old footage to build a reference library of Walker as Brian O’Conner.
He said: ‘We had to complete a performance — what Paul Walker would have done if he’d been able to continue. And it had to be his performance.’ Walker’s Brothers Cody and Caleb, as well as actor John Brotherton were scanned.
Weta motion-captured their movements and reapplied that to the digital models of Walker they had created. Technology-wise, what was done to get the movie finished is at the cutting edge of CGI. Nobody could have pulled it off five years ago, according to Joe Letteri who said “no. It was barely possible last year when we did it.”
