The VFX story of the movie Mad Max Fury Road

Mad Max: Fury Road is a 2015 action film co-written, co-produced and directed by George Miller. Miller collaborated with Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris on the screenplay. The fourth installment in the Mad Max franchise, it is an Australian venture produced by Kennedy Miller Mitchell, RatPac-Dune Entertainment and Village Roadshow Pictures. The film is set in a future desert wasteland where gasoline and water are scarce commodities.

It follows Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy), who joins forces with Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) to flee from cult leader Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and his army in an armoured tanker truck, which leads to a lengthy road battle. The film also features Nicholas Hoult, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, , and Courtney Eaton.

Mad Max: Fury Road contains 2,000 visual effects shots. The lead effects company was Iloura, who delivered more than 1,500 effects shots for the film. Additional visual effects studios that worked on the film include Method Studios, Stereo D, 4DMax, BlackGinger, The Third Floor, and Dr. D Studios. Miller recruited his wife, Margaret Sixel, to edit the film, as he felt she could make it stand out from other action films. No doubt the animation and VFX of this film successfully stole all the attention and became a great hit.

Sixel had 480 hours of footage to edit; watching it took three months. The film contains about 2,700 cuts of its entire running length, which is equivalent to 22.5 cuts per minute compared to The Road Warrior’s 1,200 cuts of its 90-minute running time equivalent to 13.33 cuts per minute. The frame rate was also manipulated. “Something like 50 or 60 percent of the film is not running at 24 frames a second, which is the traditional frame rate,” said Seale. ”

It’ll be running below 24 frames because George, if he couldn’t understand what was happening in the shot, he slowed it down until you could. Or if it was too well understood, he’d shorten it or he’d speed it up back towards 24. His manipulation of every shot in that movie is intense.” The Washington Post would later note that the changing frame rate gave the film an “almost cartoonish jerky” look.

But the intense Namibian shoot, and further filming in Sydney, was only half the story in the creation of Fury Road’s insane stunt action and post-apocalyptic landscapes. Hundreds of visual effects artists, led by overall visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, would spend considerable time crafting more than 2000 visual effects shots and helping to transform the exquisite photography into the final film that at times feels almost like a single car chase. Even more plate manipulation would also be carried out by colorist Eric Whipp, weaving in a distinctive graphic style for the film with detailed sky replacements and unique day for nights.