Biggest Mexican film budget at the time. "Venganza" 450+ VFX shots.
Supervised VFX on "Venganza," streaming on Amazon now. 450+ shots. This was the biggest movie budget in Mexico at the time, and VFX still kinda worked like it was a scrappy indie.
More than half the shots ended up being to patch production stuff that popped up.
I was on set for the 8 weeks every day, since production was so stretched, we were improvising a lot on the fly. I have worked very closely with the director before, and he has a lot of VFX experience as well, so it was great in that sense. The DP was great as well.
The chase scene plates were a last-minute scramble. The road was only closed for filming for a couple of hours, so I rigged a pickup with Komodos on the back and sent it chasing the hero cars. I was supposed to have 6 cameras, but the DP repurposed 3 of them, so I ran one pass with 3 on one side, then swapped the rig to the other side for a second pass. A lot of the shots don't line up perfectly, but it was that or no plates at all.
For the market sequence, no dedicated plate pass was scheduled either. We jerry-rigged a rig off the back of the hero truck with enough cameras to cover 180 degrees each side, we could pull plates live while the stunt team worked.
The hotel sequence was supposed to be back projection. Days before the shoot it got changed to bluescreen, too late to re-light, so we shot bluescreen with blue light coming in from outside as moonlight. Everything in frame was blue. Every keyer's nightmare.
A night scene on the last days of the shoot couldn't be shot at night. Zero prep, a couple of hours to test a night-for-day approach, then a skeleton crew of the Director, DP, a couple camera guys and me went back later to grab practical light elements to comp in and regrade.
The final scene background is fully CG. We couldn't shoot plates because of the logistics of the location. So we rebuilt the environment from drone photography, and we flew the drones inside the building to get them.
Many more stories like this.
First time supervising at this scale. Happy to get into any of it.
We had the stunt team that did one of the John Wick movies and theDungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie. Their budget was 20% of the movie's budget, is what I heard from rumors on set, haha. Our Budget was very, very tight, not even a fraction of that.
Here's the link to the movie and some pics from the shoot Reddit has taken this post down twice I guess because of the blood pics, so not posting those
