Even before the digital age of cinema, finishing Furious 7 after Paul Walker's death on November 30, 2013 would have been a frustrating task. As the actor had not yet filmed some of his important scenes, it would have been necessary to reshoot everything, but new filmmaking techniques saved the project.
Universal Pictures has kept quiet about how it completed Paul Walker's scenes in Furious 7, a film that has grossed $1.7 billion worldwide since last April. However, now that the film is a strong contender for its awards season visual effects, its VFX supervisor, Joe Letteri, explained to The Hollywood Reporter what the job went like.
The Weta Digital specialist, Peter Jackson, said that they were originally only considering doing an additional Paul Walker scene with dialogue "and that we would have to find other ways to finish the story", but then the actor's two brothers, Caleb and Cody, to help them.
The Furious 7 visual effects team scanned the bodies of both and worked with them on the scenes of Paul, who played Brian O'Conner in the franchise, "which really gave us something very close to Paul."
“That got us a long way in being able to create a character and make her perform realistic,” Letteri said.
Initially, approximately 260 shots were recorded with Paul Walker's brothers, such as the scene of the car jump from the Etihad Towers in Abu Dhabi. Their faces were later replaced with computer versions of Paul's face, although a third actor, John Brotherton, was also cast as another Paul double.
Some 90 more shots were then made, complete with outtakes and unused footage of Paul Walker from the previous Fast & Furious movies.
furious 7 paul walker visual effects
1. Caleb Walker on stage.
2. Unused footage of Paul Walker in a position similar to his brother's, but at night.
3. Paul's head is cut off from the scene.
4. Caleb's head is replaced by Paul's in this scene from the end of Furious 7, when Brian says goodbye to Toretto (Vin Diesel).
HOW WAS PAUL WALKER'S HEAD CREATED?
To create Paul Walker's substitute head, Weta scanned the actor's siblings as the closest reference, which were later altered to bring them closer to the real one with Paul, even down to his skin texture. To encourage her, Joe Letteri explained that "we used a lot of images of Paul for reference" because his brothers' gestures "were not Paul's when he played his character."
“We really tried to limit our interpretation of the character to the things that we had seen from Paul as the character. We found representations that matched the situations we needed to put him in and we used that to guide us,” he added.
Regarding the voice of Paul Walker, he indicated that the sound editors had to repeat the voice of the actor because in "most of the CG shots he had some type of dialogue" and his team animated the dummy head based on this dialogue.
Letteri added that once the first phase was done they should try to get past a perceptual zone known in visual effects as the “uncanny valley,” which is when a virtual character looks very human, but is still not quite right and ends up being creepy. For that, they adjusted details such as the corner of Paul Walker's lips, the edge of his eyes, his beard, the length and location of each of his hairs.
Although it was not the first time that an actor was recreated with visual effects technicians, it was done in Gladiator when Oliver Reed died in the middle of filming from a heart attack and in The Sopranos to complete the final scenes of Nancy Marchand, the work of Furious 7 has been over the fence.
“There really wasn't room to leave anything behind. It was too important to complete the story regarding Paul's memory to make sure when you look at it, you don't think about any part of the work that we did. If you were a fan, then you're watching Paul perform and say goodbye."
