Title: BUGATTI Chiron 0-400-0 km/h in 42 seconds – A WORLD RECORD
Client: Bugatti
Studio: Outrun Films
My roles: VFX, BTS camera op
My favourite types of visual effects are the ones you can’t see. On the day this film was launched it had millions of views within the first few hours, which has spoiled viewership numbers for me on any subsequent film ever since. At point of writing it’s on a casual 99 million views. Despite this no one has really flagged my work on it, so I feel like I must have done well.
Most of the speculation about the film centred on what on earth the tracking car was if this was a world record film - well clearly ANOTHER CHIRON. But I can tell you for my own hidden tricks, there’s a few things I had to do to make direct Al Clark’s vision complete. There was an in-car GoPro showing the record. Unfortunately the frame rate needed to nail the action didn’t match the refresh rate of the read out in the car, which was flickering so that was put back in, faithfully to the exact same numbers (and if anyone is questioning this, you can see the speedo in that shot hit the record). But the speedo in close up was a problem.
It turns out strapping a camera in-front of Juan Pablo Montoya attempting to go to 400 kmp/h isn’t great for health and safety. Rolling roads were not an option, and heavy camera gear trying to approximate it from an angle would have weighed down the car and its performance.
But we did have real data we could use. This was a world record, and working with the Bugatti team we were able to get the actual telemetry from the successful attempt to drive the movement of the pointer on the speedometer. To seal the realism and authenticity of the speedo I also used motion reference from the GoPro and made a bit of my own code that shook the camera exactly as if it was going through the same gear changes relative to the likely exceptional suspension in the Bugatti (I can’t say for sure, for some reason they wouldn’t let me drive it…). To seal the deal I took part of another tracking shot from the film and used that for the reflections, which were very recognisable a tree line on what is the longest piece of straight test track in Europe.
The actual 3D was done, not in anything as fancy as Maya (which I did go on to use for Bugatti) but in Element 3D in After Effects. I knew I could reliably make the motion I wanted in After Effects with all the weird and wonderful bits of data I was plugging in. The only real change I was asked for by the client was to remove the dust I’d added for realism - but of course they were right - the car interiors were spotless. Looking back now, and I think if you know, you can tell it’s an effect but it’s worked on an extraordinary number of people without question. I also think I removed the starting cone…making things disappear from automotive shots was also a bit of a thing for me in this period.
You can see Al’s behind the scenes video here, I’ll note you won’t see me in the set footage because..I was filming the BTS!