10 Recent Movies That Put INSANE Effort Into Scenes
8. The Batmobile Chase Was Mapped Out Using Cutting Edge VR Technology - The Batman
The Batman's astonishing Batmobile chase, in which the Dark Knight (Robert Pattinson) chases down The Penguin (Colin Farrell) is one of the most technically impressive set-pieces of the year, and one which required a ludicrous amount of prep on director Matt Reeves' part.
The majority of the chase was filmed practically, largely being shot at an airfield, Dunsfold Aerodrome, while background plates to be composited into the scene were filmed by a car mounted with a special 360-degree camera rig.
But arguably the most fascinating and unexpected aspect of the scene? Reeves used VR technology to figure out camera placement and effectively design the scene from the ground up. Reeves said in an interview:
"We had scanned in the route, and we could play on a kind of loop, what the path of the Batmobile was, and I could look at the shots in VR before we ever shot them, and I set all of these shots basically beforehand, and we made this crazy storyboard that was made of screengrabs from VR, from the lenses we had found. And so, it was an incredibly involved process."
In fact, the instantly iconic image of Batman approaching the Penguin's upturned car at the end of the chase was settled upon by toying around with the cutting edge VR tech.
Yet traditional CGI still played a vital role in the final execution of the scene, being used to make the spatial geography of the chase seem clearer to the audience by rearranging the positions of background elements, like other cars.
Given that the Batmobile chase is surely the film's marquee sequence, it was most assuredly worth all that toil.