- The film had to be delayed after the beginning of the Iraq War as trouble was caused with shipping and security in Namibia.
- The film was going to be shot in 2D and 3D however changing the lenses proved to be an issue so the film was converted to 3D in post production
- Filming was delayed twice and pushed back 2 years
- The filming first concluded in December 2012
- In Nov 2013 the team had to shoot additional scenes
- Warner Bros. insisted on getting a script because there wasn't one in preparation for shooting- only storyboards by Mark Sexton
- When did the stars sign up to be in the film?
- The film was originally going to be produced in Australia but the rain prevented it.
There was $7 million spent on TV advertising
- The crew spent 6 months in the Namibian desert
- Cameras had to be waterproof and dust proof
- Heat was a design issue
Seale shot most of the film on Arri Alexa cameras,
supplemented by far less costly Canons for the crash shots.
CGI was used sparingly mainly to enhance the Namibian
landscape, remove stunt rigging and for Charlize Theron’s left hand which in
the film is a prosthetic arm.
Originally, Mel Gibson was going to have a role as a drifter
in the film, but this never came to fruition.
Once into the testing, Seale found the contrast range
between the interiors and the harsh desert exteriors a challenge for the
cameras.
- Charlize
Theron shaved her head for her role of Furiosa, and had to wear a wig for A
Million Ways to Die in The West.
Rumours flew that Charlzie Theron and Tom Hardy, who plays
Max, did not get along at all, and that Theron got to the point of not even
speaking to Hardy on set.
Constant weather delays and location issues caused the film
to be delayed more than once, including cold when it was supposed to be hot,
and vice-versa. Reshoots also delayed the final product on countless occasions.
Miller has Peter Jackson’s WETA handling visual
f/x, makeup and costume designs for Fury Road.
Miller used post-production techniques to degrade the
footage, increasing its grain and contrast, and crunched the focus digitally.
Warner Bros. and Miller agreed to a full 12 month delay so
he could continue work on Happy Feet 2 but he’s certainly not shy about the
frustrations of making this movie a reality.
Miller had spent a long time away from the genre, with his
last three films being Happy Feet, Happy feet 2 and Babe: Pig in the City.
Dean Semler had a programme of testing the 3D cameras that
were being developed for the movie according to criteria set by Miller.
The 3D camera rig had to be small enough to go through the
windows of the truck where a lot of the action takes place.
Seale explained a raft of cameras would be needed because
Miller did not want to be delayed by a simple lens change which, on a 3D rig,
results in a time consuming optical realignment.
It was the first digital film that Seale had ever done and
it was at short notice.
Seale admits there is a price to pay in lighting compromises
for multi-camera shooting, but it is a price he believes it is worth it.
The switch to 2D shooting was a major shift in approach,
making the shoot much more straightforward, but loading post-production with a
2D to 3D conversion.
The camera crew were all over the vehicles with handheld
Canons. They'd have wide angle lenses close to actors, and they were bumping
around and trying to hang on while the thing was belting in across the desert.
It was said that unwanted camera men in the shot were to be
painted out, but that proved to be expensive so that style of photography went
out the window and was replaced by the Edge arm, which could get to most of the
positions we were able to get to when we were strapped to the vehicles
- Production began in 2009
- DOP
John Seale would use multiple digital cameras to capture incredible practical
stunts with more than 150 vehicles conceived by production designer Colin
Gibson
Hundreds of visual effects artists, spent considerable amount
of time crafting more than 2000 visual effects shots and helping to transform
the exquisite photography into the final film
More than 1500 shots overseen by visual effects supervisor
Tom Wood and producer Fiona Crawford
Additional work was completed by Method Studios and
BlackGinger, with early previs delivered by The Third Floor
The film has been promoted as being a live action stunt
driven film
There
is little CGI in the film
There’s 2000 VFX shots in the film
The
Citadel location was produced via a combination of principal photography in
Namibia, shooting in Sydney and visual effects work from Iloura informed by
actual rock cliffs
Jackson considered reference locations in Jordan, including
the famous Wadi Rum Mountains, but ultimately found suitable cliffs in the Blue
Mountains west of Sydney.
We had the chopper standing by for 10 days waiting for the
right filming conditions in the mountains. We didn’t have one cloudy day for a
week and a half, but the day we went was just perfect.
Iloura spent significant time re-working the cliff textures
and geometry to form the Citadel to the required final look
The rock-platform balcony went through a huge number of
iterations
The water flow from the pipes made use of a Houdini
simulation for wide shots, with some practical water on set from a rain machine
The water machine sprayed out more than a mist - it was more
like rain. The rain splashes on some rocks causing a slight flow and everything
above that was VFX
A combination of real photography in Namibia of various cars
and additional greenscreen and stage shoots was combined with CG car
take-overs, digital doubles and complex fluid and dust simulations by Iloura
for the storm.
Additional VFX elements were shot to help tie pieces
together and provide for more foreground dust
Although the driving sequence could have been achieved
almost completely in CG, it was important from the director’s point of view to
shoot actual vehicles driving to retain realistic camera movement
On location in Namibia, production approximated where the
twisters in the toxic storm would be located, and then had vehicles drive
accordingly
Tom Wood was working on concepts and the look of the
twisters and suggested the idea of flames being swept up into the swirling dust
cloud
Wood engaged some concept artists to flesh out the storm
shots and the twister moments, which Miller then approved
The twister moments were all shot in predominantly bright
sunlight on a very flat empty piece of desert which proved difficult trying to
control the dust layers and lighting.
They had dust kicked up from the car and they were all glinting
and very directionally lit, which then had to be suppressed
They would track the vehicles and put CG replacements in
with new directional lighting - or flashed from live to CG and back again, so
there could be lightning flashing from all different directions and dust
shadowing the cars that they couldn’t have on set
Iloura’s CG cars - also used in other crash shots - were
built from photogrammetry surveys, again processed in Photoscan
Early previs for the shot had the War Boys’ bodies as fixed
figures spinning up into the air - this was based on Miller’s initial desire
that they followed real dynamics and physics, since a great deal of crash
reference footage the director had sourced tended to show that movement.
Wood also sourced crash footage, including from Isle of Man
TT motorcycle races.
Iloura applied real life movements (having no control over
your limbs) to digi-doubles of the War Boys in rag-doll sim software Endorphin
when they were flung off the vehicles, however Miller didn't like the end result
Ultimately Iloura went back to Endorphin with more elaborate
sims and key frame animation for the final flying War Boys shots.
The cast and crew spent 10 months in Namibia
Both Iloura and Jackson’s Fury FX group took on the canyon
shots, which involved significant environment augmentations
For the rock wall detonation, the initial plan was to use CG
sims to achieve the effect.
The War Rig stuck in swampy mud sequence was actually filmed
in the Namibian desert in bright daylight, but was then transformed into a blue
environment by colorist Eric Whip
Jackson’s rational was that an overexposed image would
contain more detail and less noise, and on the Alexa would roll off into the
highlights while not quite clipping, and therefore be suitable for grading from
day to night.
Editing shots from broad daylight to night time had the team
doing versions where the sky was more de-saturated and more cyan
A way
of getting the exposure to work had shots that start a little darker and then
gets brighter
A
mobile refinery being pulled by a Mercedes limo truck explodes with an enormous
fireball right in the middle of a throng of chasing vehicles. Conceived as a
practical effect, the refinery was blown up in Namibia, with Iloura then composting in the other cars and Max on a foreground pole
The main truck was driven remotely, surrounded by camera
cars and a helicopter, and blew up
Andrew Jackson went back out and shot equivalent plates for
all the chase vehicles to be around the exploding truck
Originally the final chase was shot on very flat desert and
Miller wanted to see the start of the canyon around it - and then composting
the vehicles around it, with Max on a pendulum
CG car models in previs were built to the same size and
specifications as the practical vehicles in order to work within the
limitations of how the cameras and actors could fit within that space
It was also important that the cars did not exceed a given
speed so that the action depicted would be true to what they could legally and
safely shoot.
The previs had to carefully track where everyone was at a
particular beat and help work out the transitions so the characters would be at
the right place at the right time
The crash sequence made use of numerous Namibia plates,
including stationary action that would be enhanced with moving backgrounds,
canyon augmentation, a War Rig and other vehicle crash stunts.
A large amount of dry wall rocks and dust and crashed down
and was filmed it at 240 fps on an IPhone 6 for the slow mo bit at the end just
because Andrew Jackson didn’t want to do CG dust - he wanted to do real dust
Theron wore a prosthetic and a green sleeve during the shoot
that the visual effects team then painted out, adding in a central mechanical
piece where necessary.
To fight, Charlize Theron wore a green glove and was asked
not to use her left hand
Scenes with foggy skies were replaced in editing to match
scenes with blue skies
- In Baselight, Whipp (colourist) was able to use a ‘mishmash’
of tools to make the sky replacements work.
- Initially Whipp took some on-set footage and
experimented with looks, but the hardest part was tracking the sometimes shaky
plates
-
Whipp
says that for some shots he had to track the camera by hand.
- Traditional roto and luminance keys were used by Whipp
and his team where foreground action would take place in front of skies
- Realising early on that the film would require
significant visual effects work, Jackson engaged an in-house team to perform
postvis.
-
The
other thing that came out of the postvis process was, when your shots are half
a second to a second long, the postvis was virtually good.
- Much of the expense is likely attributed to the road-ripping vehicles and the creative, but savage weaponry that will appear in
the film.
- Tom Hardy apologised to director George Miller for not
better understanding the filmmaker's vision on set and being frustrated with
his process.
Film Editor Margaret Sixel was given over 480 hours of
footage to create MAD MAX: FURY ROAD.
The final edit ran 120 minutes and
consisted of 2700 individual shots.
By using “Eye Trace” and “Crosshair Framing” techniques
during the shooting, the editor could keep the important visual information in
the film vital in the centre of the frame
Liam Fountain auditioned for Max but lost the part to Tom
Hardy. Liam Fountain played Max in the 2011 short film Mad Max Renegade, which
takes place between the first two films.
Once production began, principal photography took the better
part of a year — most of 2012, to be exact.
The film has generated $374 million at the box office
worldwide, had 22.90 million shares on torrent networks over the 2015 summer.
Thanks to years of delays and cost overruns, Mad Max: Fury
Road ended up costing (according to Entertainment Weekly) $150 million to
produce.
There is a fifth addition to the franchise in the works, Mad
Max: Furiosa, which Miller could shoot right after he finishes Fury Road.
Mad Max: Fury Road was released May14th 2015 (UK)
Jenny Beavan (Costume) brought in collaborators from the
U.K., and employed local workers to create (and distress) the film’s largely
leather garments and masks.
The crew had a bunch of little cameras aside from the Alexa
Ms. John tested Canon 5Ds and ran them past the visual effects department.
While the quality obviously wasn't up to that of an Alexas, the visual effects
department said they could be used
Hardy was cast as Max in June 2010, with production planned to begin that November.
Once committed to a production, Seale accepts the parameters
of the job and works within them, a process he calls locking your brain down.
