Name: F1 movie VFX supervisor reveals how film was made | BBC News
Uploaded: 2026-03-03T11:31:14.000Z
Duration: 4 min 7 s
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I was the visual effects supervisor on F1.

Our ultimate goal was for audiences to walk out of the theater not having any idea that we were there at all.

When you actually try to film something for real, even if it's not the right thing, even if it's the wrong car or that you have to do extensive aug to that material, there's a foundation to the shot and to the sequences.

The primary need, of course, sort of capture the world.

We also recreate the cars digitally because we don't have access to the real F1 race cars.

The teams obviously protect those assets very closely, keep that very close to their chest.

So what we effectively did is we would go around, oftentimes on the gridwalk before races and take photographs of all of the other cars ultimately, so our team could rebuild those cars digitally, and

then we could reskin any other car that we needed to add them into the background.

Oftentimes, we would do our stunt racing with our own cars that we had built for the movie, and

then we would swap that car out for, say, a Mercedes or a Ferrari or whatever needed to occur for that particular moment in the race.

The other aspect of what we did was we relied extensively on broadcast footage, but

So on the flip side, we would reskin various cars in that material as well, so that Steven Marioni, our editor, could merge that footage with the footage that we had captured stunt driving.

And whether we're putting our car into the broadcast footage or we're putting other teams cars into our footage, you sort of mix and match those techniques.

So there are overall about 2,500 visual effects shots in the film.

And the hope is, is that by approaching each shot, even if it's in a single sequence, each shot in a little bit of a different way, you keep the audience on their toes.

Here comes Sonny Hayes, ladies and gentlemen, using those warm tires to carve his way through the back of the field.

And if you ever need confidence in your car, it's here at Silverstone.

Certain situations, we would run a custom array vehicle that we designed to drive around tracks, and

then our stunt team actually drove the vehicle around the tracks so that we made sure that we were following the proper race line for the choreography of what was required and that sort of captured the environment and the entire world.

We typically would run that during a Grand Prix weekend.

So the hope was, is that we would have a lot of the crowd in the environment and all the signage and sponsors.

And then there were situations where, due to a variety of factors, we may not have had a piece of footage at the proper track.

So we were able to swap tracks as required.

So if one of our cast or stunt drivers did a sequence at Silverstone, we might be able to change that entire background to Monza to make that work for a different sequence.

So we really had some interchangeability there in terms of what the environments were.

And it also helped us for a pretty substantial sequence in Italy, where script calls for rain and it's too dangerous to drive at speed in those conditions.

So we approached that sort of in a what we call dry for wet situations.

So we filmed it dry and then digitally added all the water, the rain, the spray, the reflections on the surface of the environment and so forth.

If you think about it, you don't really want the production design to really jump out at you when you're watching a film.

You don't want the hair and makeup to jump out at you, and

you don't want to think about those things.

What you want to do is you want to be immersed in a story and you want to believe that it's real.

And so, for us, it's the highest compliment for people to really not even talk about the visual effects at all.

If they just feel like the movie was real and they believe the story story, then we feel like we've done our job.