Formula 1 history is filled with stories like this. Teams that come out of nowhere and somehow find a way to innovate or pull off a miracle and and win. It was a nice parallel to the filmmaking process.
On the face of it, Formula 1 teams and movie crews look like they're entirely different entities. But scratch the surface, and there are so many similarities in the way they operate. Underlying everything is ability to pivot and respond very quickly to new challenges and unexpected challenges.
This job's completely unique. I never thought I'd find myself, you know, trying to record dialogue, at a live F1 track, a fairly hostile environment, really, with all the noise that's going on and the radio frequencies from the cars, other film crews. We’ve been using Simon RFs, Cobham video transmitters to transmit sound of the cars back to me.
Electrical department, props, costume, everybody. Everyone's helped facilitate the sound capture on the project. I think audiences are going to get a perspective of what it's like to be in one of these machines.
The sound, it's it's what you're seeing, the feeling. We used every tool we could to to capture that. So on this film, we needed to place, the recording unit, somewhere on a car that has no storage space.
I mean, it's just enough room for the driver. Now we have 16 different angles on the car. It's the first time we've ever had a remote camera that can turn and move.
I mean, if you look at this camera body that's 4K, this is like this is like cutting edge. This one moves 360. Can catch us, can catch one of the other drivers.
The same thing, this one fully rotates. And then this one back here, it's really nice because when you see the tire hit some bumps, you also see the steering wheel at the same time. So we’re receiving the pictures from the cars the cars the beaming pictures to our receive sites around the circuit and then comes back to, comes back to mission control.
But the picture quality you get is exceptional and that allows the director to see exactly what he wants when he needs it in the exact depth of the field and everything, which is something quite special for them. We wrote some software and sure enough, we've been able to, you know, talk to the cameras, talk to the lens, control. Everything you see that's on the car in the RF, pretty much we've built and, just, you know, specifically to fit this car.
We definitely wanted to be able to show that our actors are in the middle of a race. Putting it on was one thing. And then the next thing was being able to drive at 200 miles an hour and have it manage all the vibrations and not translate to the image.
So, you know, these, this is, I don't know if you could see it, but there's a little bit of vibration isolation here. And it is all manually done based on the kind of tires we have and how rough the track is. Having the likes of Joe there to push us, the boundaries of of what we can do and what we're allowed to do, and we say we can go more he's quite happy us going more.
And yeah, it's it's been amazing. We've been rehearsing and testing for months. Sometimes things don't go exactly as you planned, but, in those moments, sometimes you get more than what you hoped for.
We are capturing and driving the cars that Brad and Damson are in, so it's sort of an extension of their characters. Sonny's first test sequence in front of the APEX crew he's going to catch a snap, go into the wall at almost a hundred miles an hour, it's going to be an unmanned car, remote driven by our stunt driver, Craig. And we got two shots at that.
I think it was one of our most ambitious stunts that was done on the movie, got it sideways and got the rotation enough for Joe and visual effects to cut into to create the spin to the stop with Brad. Yeah, we got the shot. So, it’s amazing.
When you're part of a Formula 1 team you're part of 700, 1000 people who are all working in their specific areas towards one common outcome, and that's to get a Formula 1 car and its driver over the line first. Now, looking at how movie production works, it's so similar. There are hundreds of people who are specialists in their field who all come together to create one moment.
So there's a lot of innovation I think we did in order to shoot this the way we did. And I do believe that through problems you come up with solutions that, in the end, can make the film better than what you originally set out to do.
