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OSCAR PICKS www.postmagazine.com 22 POST JAN/FEB 2026 acters of Jake, Quaritch and Neytiri, for example, and I figured it was safe to hand them characters that we had a good legacy amount of data on. We could give them a lot of the previous shots and let them unpack it, study it and figure out their own unique workflow. And that worked out well, as you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the Weta and ILM character scenes." Asked if there were any surprises in the VFX process, Cameron reports that, "it was continuity for all the wounds, bruises, blood and so on that you'd have worked out with makeup continuity if you were shooting live-action. For some reason, this is a blind spot in VFX, and it turns out to be a big deal, and so we had to actually go back, either with the actors or with human models, and paint them blue, and put on the ash or the blood, or whatever, and photograph it, and have them move around, hit different lighting, and then scan all that stuff and put it into the renders." What was the hardest visual effects sequence to get right? "All of them," he says. "We hovered between re- ally hard and impossible every single day on every shot because we refused to let our guard down on photoreality. Now, within that, anything with water and fire — which means anything with fluid dy- namics — is hard. I think water's more difficult than fire any day, and I wouldn't say we struggle with it, but it's not automated. We have a great suite of simulation tools, and we've got a great sim team, but it still requires highly-observant humans in the loop to look at it and say, 'Alright, it's doing what it's supposed to do.'" If any film can give Avatar: Fire and Ash a run for its money, it'll probably be F1 and its nominees — Ryan Tudhope, Nicolas Chevallier, Robert Harrington and Keith Dawson. The visual effects were super- vised by Tudhope and split between Framestore, which had a team in London and a team in Montreal, and Industrial Light & Magic, which did the Daytona sequence. Tudhope, previously a key collaborator with director Joseph Kosinski on Top Gun: Maverick, adapted that film's groundbreaking digital jet-reskinning techniques to the race cars of Formula One. "That was the key to shooting F1," explains Kosinski. "The first thing I did was get Formula One to give me :30 of a race at Silverstone in their most uncompressed format. It was a ProRes file of about :30, five shots, and with my digital designer, Daniel Simon, we designed a new kind of made-up team and gave that digital model to Framestore. And we tried the technique out by re-skinning Lewis Hamilton's car in the race with our fictional APXGP car, and we left Lewis in the driver's seat in that footage. And that was our proof of concept. And once that was finished, I showed it to Formula One, to Lewis, and they were all blown away by how realistic it was. So that proved the technique would work, and it was something that we employed heavily throughout the film, both in footage that we shot ourselves, our onboard footage shot with the actors, but also in footage that we captured at the camera level during the races right off the broadcast cameras. "We installed decks that captured uncompressed right off the chip, giving us a super high-quality 4K image from their live events. And piecing that together in editorial was a massive challenge, and then marking up which car had to be which was a huge challenge as well. But ultimately, when you see the finished product, hopefully as a viewer, you're not aware of what we shot, what's real rac- ing, what's staged racing, and which car is real and which one isn't." Kosinski reports that the most difficult visual effects to do in the whole film were two shots that each took about a year to complete. "The first one is a big aerial shot that introduces Silverstone and flies in and pushes all the way into a closeup on Joshua. That shot feels like one shot, but it's actually a stitch of two or three elements, to make that seamless. It just took a lot of fine tuning and stabilizing and massaging to make that work. "The other one was the big accident, when Brad Pitt's character goes into the fence at Las Vegas. During the SAG strike, I couldn't shoot with my SAG actors, but that's a track that only exists three nights out of the year. So, in 2023 I went to the track during the race, and in one of those 10-min- ute windows I had access, I shot the plates for that accident, and then we spent about a year working on the physics simulation and rendering of that one shot, and we worked on it all the way up to the release deadline." The very first scene in Sinners, where the twin brothers share a cigarette, was crucial in creating the twinning illusion, and VFX supervisor Michael Ralla and VFX producer James Alexander explored every possible method on how to do the twinning. "We went to a bunch of different companies, including Lola and Scanline, and we explored tra- ditional face replacements, volumetric capture and AI face swaps," says Ralla. "But with 65mm IMAX film, a lot of the AI-based approaches were simply not good enough, as the resolution wasn't holding up. That would have been the easiest route to go." Instead, they went for a head-replacement approach, and developed a special 'halo rig,' a circular shoulder harness that had 12 cameras in total around Michael B. Jordan's head that record- ed data of his performance as he shot each take. Then they built a whole workflow around that with Rising Sun Pictures, which gave them a full head replacement. Ultimately, the process included shooting with body doubles as well, "and it was a massive coordination effort between sound and camera effects and VFX effects," Ralla notes. Storm did all the complex split-screen work, and the surreal montage, and for all the driving and hundreds of cotton field shots they used Base Effects in China. ILM in Vancouver did the train station scenes, and French company Light Effects did all the foreshadowing and premonition scenes. The team also had an in-house VFX team, "so it was this massive effort from all the different VFX vendors involved," Ralla sums up. And the winner is…. stay tuned. Some of the VFX in F1 took a year to complete.