‘F1: The Movie’ VFX Supe Ryan Tudhope Takes Us Behind the Scenes

This article was written for the July-August ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 351).

Director Joseph Kosinski recently shifted gears from Top Gun: Maverick’s aerial acrobatics of F/A-18s to the high-octane asphalt feats of Apple Original Films’ F1: The Movie without missing a beat. In the new summer release, Brad Pitt plays a wily veteran who teaches a rookie driver (played by Damson Idris) how to master machine and speedway as well as a few life lessons.

“Both the director and I believe that when you shoot for real and give the camera operator something to follow, you end up with a shot foundation that’s more realistic rather than trying to invent all of it in the computer.”

— VFX supervisor Ryan Tudhope

Despite the emphasis on capturing everything in camera, there were still 2,500 visual effects shots that had to be produced over a period of a year and a half by Framestore, ILM, Red VFX, Lola VFX and Metaphysic. As the film’s VFX supervisor, Ryan Tudhope, recalls, “We sat down with [director] Joe and [cinematographer] Claudio Miranda and essentially framed up the shots that they wanted in Unreal Engine. We had match-mated a real lap that [driver] Lewis Hamilton had done around Silverstone, and could essentially hit play and look at all of the cameras we’d selected, and every position that they were in a virtual way, and get an approval for where they should go. That’s how we had confidence in Mercedes building all of those mounts, so they could go on the real car.”

Tudhope points out that technology has further improved since making Top Gun: Maverick. “A critical upgrade was being able to see the footage as it was happening,” he says. “On Maverick, we would hit record, the jets would go up, two hours later they would show up after running out of fuel, we would pop the cards in and see what we got. But extensive radio frequencies were put around each track that we filmed at, and those frequencies fed the live footage from all of the cameras on multiple cars at the same time. We might be looking at eight or nine live HD feeds from these cars while they were going around the track and doing the stunt work. We were also able to operate the cameras, which was another upgrade from the Maverick technology.”

The Art of the Reskin

Reskinning Formula One cars was one of the major focuses of the visual effects work. “Both Joe and I believe that when you shoot for real and give the camera operator something to follow, you end up with a foundation of a shot that is much more realistic rather than trying to invent all of it in the computer,” says Tudhope. “At the end of the film, when one of our heroes is battling with a Mercedes, we shot all of that with a picture car standing in as the Mercedes. Then we digitally reskinned that other car to look like a Mercedes or Ferrari. That gave us the grounded reality we were after. There were cases where a stunt was too dangerous for us to put our car into, so we opted to do that with a much less expensive Formula Three car, which is quite a bit smaller; we would digitally reskin them to look like our Apex car.”

There was a whole other layer of reskinning made necessary by shooting during actual Formula One races. “It was determined early on that F1’s handle on filming races was much more thorough and figured out,” explains Tudhope. “We had an entire team setup within the F1 tents that took the uncompressed video feed from all of those cameras and recorded it. We put it down to 25 fps, played it back at 24 fps and added some motion blur to make it feel more cinematic. We had hundreds of hours of real race material that our editors could pick from to insert and combine with the stuff that we had shot with our production cameras. From a visual effects standpoint, that meant whatever was happening in the real race at that moment, we would at the very least swap out one of the cars for our Apex car. Oftentimes we reskinned the entire [car] and multiple cars in a particular shot because continuity became an important thing.”

Apple developed some amazing camera technology that was used on real Formula One cars for over-the-shoulder shots. “Joe was able to pick which cars those cameras were going to be on during the race,” says Tudhope. “He knew that if in the story of Hungary, our cars needed to be towards the back [and] he would choose someone he felt was probably going to qualify towards the middle or back. We would put the cameras on those cars. That gave us an on-car view at a high quality in the real race, and we were then able to reskin the foreground cars to look [like] our car or change things. It became an effort of capturing all of the different pieces of footage that we could, knowing that we could digitally augment them later and make it all fit together.”

Sparks are a prominent atmospheric feature on the speedway. “The real F1 cars have titanium [skid blocks] on the underside, and if they come in after a race and too much of that has been scrapped away, they’ll be penalized,” says Tudhope. “It’s a way of keeping them honest in terms of their ride height and not getting the cars too low. When you see the cars sparking, that was something we either added as a way of being authentic to what was happening, or it might be in real footage. We would always preserve the sparks from the original footage and put our car behind that. In the Abu Dhabi race at the end, it was a fun way to add some in-your-face energy during the highest stress moment of the film.”

Fantastic Flips

In the film, the Apex car flips over a race barrier and explodes in a spectacular crash. “That was a partnership with Keith Dawson, our special effects supervisor, who developed this incredible platform that shot cars down this ramp, and the rail tilted up at the end, launching the car, which went spinning and spinning,” reveals Tudhope. “Originally, we had envisioned that the car would fly through the air, crash through a sign and crumble down there. The first time the car was launched, it landed before the sign, so they turned up the pressure in the rig as well as a couple of other things. The car ended up way beyond the sign and in the trees.”

He adds, “That was something even better than what we expected. We had cameras all over it, which were digitally removed, replaced the floor of the car and augmented the explosion. That entire corner was filmed at Brands Hatch in the U.K., which is a legendary racetrack doubling for Parabolica at Monza in Italy. There was a whole other batch of work to make it feel like it was in Italy and adding a grandstand. The rain that comes midrace was also something that wasn’t there. It was digital wet downs and rain to give the cars that sense of danger and slipperiness out there.”

Tudhope believes there is never one path to follow creatively and technically: “My favorite way to deliver visual effects is with a variety of techniques so the audience doesn’t have enough time to figure it out.”

F1: The Movie opened worldwide on June 27 and is currently in theaters through Warner Bros. Pictures.