TOKYO DRIFT WAS NOT FILMED IN TOKYO

hollywood knows that great visual effects are the key to a successful blockbuster film they've been doing it this way for decades universal i think has done a great job of putting audiences in the driver's seat though through creative cinematography during this fast and furious franchise they've also done a great job of putting audiences in exotic foreign countries or have they the fact is that in most of the fast and furious movies we've seen filming was done nowhere near the country that it is being portrayed on screen for example the gas tanker hijacking sequence and fast forward that was supposed to be in the dominican republic was actually filmed in the castaic lake area just north of los angeles nowhere near the dominican republic fast five was not even filmed in brazil it was all shot in puerto rico except for some stock aerial footage of the christ redeemer statue at the beginning of the movie but universal's trickery started even earlier it started with tokyo drift and it required a monumental effort from nearly a dozen visual effects companies to complete the illusion that story is coming up right after the break did you know that the average driver gets nine traffic tickets in their lifetime look i'll be the first to admit that i've taken maybe a couple of liberties with traffic laws back in the day and of course when i got caught i had to go to court to fight the ticket which was always a hassle and each time that i lost my case it meant big fines points on my record and higher insurance premiums eventually i realized that nothing beats having a good attorney argue your case in court so here's what you do you download the off the record app to your phone and register for an account and if you get a ticket simply upload a photo of your ticket into the app and you will be quickly matched with a lawyer in your jurisdiction your lawyer will start working your case right away and in most cases you'll never have to set foot in a courtroom off the record has a 97 success rate and a 4.9 star rating on google and guess what they even offer a money-back guarantee if they aren't able to reduce the points or keep that ticket fully off your record best of all i've arranged a 10 discount for all of my youtube viewers so download the app and register using the referral code fast life to receive 10 off your first case one of the more fascinating stories of the fast and furious franchise was how tokyo drift was actually filmed mostly in los angeles a matter of fact 90 percent of it was filmed in los angeles most people thought the cast and crew really did go to tokyo to capture these scenes but in reality getting filming permits plus the complicated and expensive logistics coupled with the actors schedules just made this all but impossible after the success of the first two movies universal wanted to ramp things up a notch the first fast and furious movie used about 150 visual effects shots two years later too fast too furious more than tripled that visual effects shot count with tokyo drift though universal pictures would end up using no less than 768 visual effects shots or cg shots cg for those who don't know stands for computer generated before you question the logic of producing expensive cg shots rather than going on location to japan you need to know a few things first off japan is not friendly to movie production in japan if you want to film a movie you must work with a japanese film and production crew you have to get filming permits which is not easy making it harder is that in japan there's a culture of analysis paralysis the government takes months to make even a simple decision about the most mundane things it's a real hassle so hollywood doesn't wait and so universal decided early on that they would lean heavily on cg and where possible they would use japanese film crews when it could be arranged and simply sneak around a bit and shoot clips kind of run and gun style and bootleg fashion when there was no other choice so let's dig into the locations to see what was filmed where and how we faked the rest basically of course we all remember the storyline of tokyo drift the notorious and troubled sean boswell played by lucas black can't seem to keep himself out of trouble especially when he gets anywhere near cars the movie opens in a high school parking lot his high school as we see in a little passing shot is supposedly oro valley high school which is in arizona but in reality it's actually juan rodriguez cabrillo high school and off of santa fe avenue and long beach in southern california from there the movie switched to a housing track presumably in a developing community in arizona that's what the high school was right but the race between the viper and the monte carlo actually took place in a construction site near victorville california just off interstate 15 about 80 miles northeast of los angeles and nowhere near oro valley high school in arizona which is 350 miles away the housing development in the movie was called shangri-la estates which is not what is called in real life as you can probably guess and it's where we saw the two cars racing along the then half built ferndale road and bow spring street which is right at the intersection of a street called warpath this housing track is actually in the golden mesa district west of victorville california which is way out in the desert after the scene we learned that sean boswell's repeated street racing offenses have landed him in real trouble he gets in front of a judge and promptly gets exiled to japan the global capital of illegal street racing and he goes there to live with his dad who's apparently in the hookers once there sean is quickly befriended by twinkie played by little bow wow who promptly introduces him and audiences to a drifting scene in a japanese multi-story parking garage which as you probably guessed was actually thousands of miles away from japan you see where i'm going with this this garage seat was filmed entirely here right here in southern california at the now abandoned hawthorne mall parts of it still exists but it's basically fenced off japanese lettering was painted on the floors inside of the parking garage and on the walls to help complete the illusion the production team also bought actual japanese vending machines and flew them in from japan and did the same with japanese cars we got some authentic right-hand drive true jdm japanese cars while all the cars in the scene were made by japanese manufacturers not all of them were shipped in from japan just for this movie in fact we sourced about 150 cars locally through my company moviecars.com with the steering wheels on the wrong side but they were japanese cars and they were all owned by private owners so they were stuck around in the garage in different areas and you pretty much didn't see them up close but they were there shortly after sean's embarrassing drifting debut he finds himself at han's garage which was as you might have guessed nowhere near tokyo we couldn't be further away really in real life the garage was a warehouse on santa fe avenue at mesquite street in downtown l.a beneath the old sixth street viaduct bridge that area was redeveloped after the bridge was demolished in 2016 so if you go to that location now it looks very different before long han shows sean the real reason why he drifts to meet girls by performing donuts around two women at an intersection in downtown l.a which was supposed to be downtown tokyo more lies more lies that intersection was nowhere near tokyo it was right here in los angeles in the wilshire area you'll notice that most of the shots were done at street level point of view or from an overhead angle which meant that very little cg would need would be needed for this shot you'll also notice that the street was empty there was no cars and virtually no people walking around that never happens in japan that should have been a huge clue that this scene was not filmed in a japanese city sean boswell's dad's apartment is on a quiet back street of the azuba juban district the whole area has been transformed since filming took place so it's not really recognizable at all today so i can't i don't have a better shot of it the rooftop aerial shots around the 48 minute mark are of the adidas futsal park overlooking the shibuya area the bright pink botan pachinko parlor with the phone box outside it which first appears around the 36 minute mark is not a real japan location at all but it was instead filmed at universal studios with with creative camera angles so you couldn't see the light fixtures that would have given that away this classic shot of yasukuni dory in shinjiku i think it was at around the 69 minute mark that shot has been featured in so many movies and tv programs over the years but this one was fake using plate shots on cg take a look at this picture here's a screenshot from the movie and here's the real location are you feeling like they lied because they did this is all part of the chase scene where dk is chasing after han remember that scene and for the final race in the film the roads used are off san gabriel canyon road route 39 at the southern tip of the san gabriel reservoir a few miles northeast of azusa and east of los angeles in fact that's the san gabriel dam you can see in the background of the race starting line you see those little lights that's the san gabriel dam now that i've given you a quick rundown of where the locations were let's talk about the real story how did we pull this off because the most interesting part of the story is how we created the world famous shibuya street scene and a parking lot right here in los angeles you heard that right it was all created in a parking lot all of these shots were filmed on wilshire boulevard between grand avenue and flower street in total tokyo drift required the creation of 768 visual effects shots as i talked about a few minutes ago and the talents of the 10 visual effects companies were enlisted various techniques were applied from 3d scanning of cars to installing giant green screens on the sides of buildings and as we saw in the film when the 3d scans of cars were combined with plate shots of green screen buildings and then blended together you would swear that this movie was actually filled in japan and of course that was the goal so how do we do it it was a monumental effort an impressive list of visual effects companies pull their resources to make it happen some of these companies have been working on visual effects for decades here's the list hammerhead who produced 206 rhythm and used chipped in 123 shots cis hollywood contributed 172 shots cafe fx provided 58 shots pacific title out of 164 shots illusion arts added four shots and industrial light magic everybody's heard about them two shots they provided perpetual motion provided 19 shots and digital backlog provided four shots and hatch fx provided the cliff extensions and a complete environment for six hammerhead shots let's dig in a little deeper basically to pull off the illusion of being in japan giant green screens were used to combine plate shots and cg to make it all work you have to understand what both of these processes are and how they work together i'll get into that in just a minute so bear with me but basically if you've ever seen a green screenshot or if you've ever clipped a background out of an image in photoshop you probably have a pretty decent understanding of the concept as you can see here you film live action set against the green screens and then you digitally add the backgrounds and you now have the basic elements of the shot from there it's basically a matter of playing with light shadows reflections smoke and that kind of thing and you've created a scene this is how it's done in hollywood in the case of tokyo drift's chase scene imagine the side of buildings covered with green screen some of them going up to about 60 feet high or more the live action basically happens on the street as the cars whiz by the green screens all the screens and walls you see will be used to create cg backgrounds they're just blank panels really with these shots now captured on film the visual effects team then uses cg to blend the background scenes from the japanese buildings with the real life action in post-production using several different types of software it's kind of like using photoshop but for videos rather than pictures you get the basic idea the main requirements of the visual effects we're creating green screen composites for car interior shots and all of this to give the illusion that our actors were actually driving in tokyo that was the main thing and they had to look like they were driving there cg was necessary because it wasn't possible to close these streets down it just wasn't going to happen that way cg had to be used so everything pretty much had to be created digitally it's not just a question of capturing and blending shots of cars driving by buildings things like lights reflections off the cars off the windshield and all the pedestrians would have to be added in digitally can you imagine that in the two previous movies visual effects were often just utilized to create impossible camera moves to simulate the car stunts that were too dangerous to perform in real life but for tokyo drift the requirements were completely different director justin lynn wanted the car races and action sequences to feel real and doing that digitally is very difficult justin wanted to avoid using the kind of impossible shots that we saw in the first two movies so again cg was the way to go since so much of this movie would feature the characters driving around in one shot or another it was super important to come up with a way to convincingly make it look like the actors were really doing the driving and that's something a lot of movies don't do well three different techniques were basically used number one first in some shots the actors were photographed while sitting in a car that was attached to a tow rig nothing new about that technique it's been used for at least 60 years number two in other shots the actors were filmed manning a fake steering wheel while a stunt man was driving from the other side of the car and remember most of the cars were right-hand drive so the guy was driving from the correct side lastly a large number of shots were captured by pulling actors into what we call process cars and shoot against a giant green screen or a blue screen on the sound stage like you can see in this clip while on the sound stage most of the time the cars were filmed without any window or windshield this is an old trick these elements were added later in cg with the proper reflections special effects coordinator matt sweeney who worked on the first movie built another one of his air casters rig that was able to float multiple car bodies on a dance floor would look like a dan dance floor on a blue screen stage this gave the director very organic movement between the cars and the camera it just looked natural especially when you add in the reflections and as i mentioned it all starts with capturing the backgrounds visual effects supervisor mike wassel and his crew then set out to capture the background plates using a newly designed rig on the first movie they used a six camera circle vision system that captured 240 degrees of the environment that's a bunch of cameras in a circle these ones used 28 millimeter lenses and circle vision setup like this one was used to get 360 degree shots of the area and from this the cg work can begin basically you have to get the background shots first everything starts with the background when the action proved to be impossible to capture in the camera cg cars would have to be used the real vehicles were 3d scanned using lidar the same stuff that gives you a laser ticket which allowed hammerhead to build a very accurate 3d representation of each cars the models were then textured with still photographs of the real crawlers that were provided for production so that as to serve as a guide the lidar data was then shared between hammerhead and rhythm and use both in charge of sequences and necessitating cg cars so they need to make three models of the cars and those two companies handle doing that in particular hammerhead also handled the final drift sequence where dk and sean boswell race down a treacherous mountain road at night we all remember that cg animation was used to show one of those cars flying off the cliff edge remember that all cg as you probably guessed but the biggest scene of course was the shibuya chase for that scene rnh visual effects was the company that was tasked with the most intense work you've seen their work in movies like uh you remember that movie flight of the intruder there was a lot of a lot of that stuff done by r h but in this sequence this character is raced through shibuya square a landmark location that is to tokyo what time square is to new york it's always crowded it's always busy and it's almost impossible to close that area down for a movie shoot so it had to be done digitally so the art department recreated the whole plaza as a full-size set in a parking lot in los angeles they built the entire ground level including sidewalks street lights pretty much everything but they did not reproduce the building's front facades everything from the ground up was added digitally and for this sequence they basically had two types of long shots they had either real cars shot on the la set that they combined with a computer generated tokyo or computer generated cars that they combined with the real tokyo see where i'm going it was a huge undertaking as we needed to build a 3d representation of shibuya square but also create crowds of people as well as cars that's right i said crowds too the film production provided various elements including the lidar scans of the real shiboya square and the tarmac set used to stand in for shiboya thousands of high resolution photographs of the actual location 3d models of the cars and running footage of the camera car driving through the real square together they put all those elements together to make the shot one of the problems on location was that there was always people on the sidewalk you could never clearly see the storefronts in the plate photography so to get around that here's what they had to do they had to get a camera cruise to go out there early in the morning at street level and take hundreds of pictures using a small crew where there would be nobody walking in front of the store fronts and that's how they did it of course it had to be done early in the morning because they didn't have a filming permit doing it this way allowed the visual effects team to capture and build an exact representation of the buildings right down to the lights r and h used the lidar scans as a basis for the 3d models that were built in the 3d modeling program called maya for those of you who do 3d work you know this program well the visual effects wizards not only had to recreate tokyo but also the citizens industry as well as i was just saying so depending on the shots there were up to 6 000 cg people in frame giant studios captured about 200 different human actions and movements then they built six base models that were used with two rigs male and female they created cg renditions of everything including things like briefcases shopping bags umbrellas all that kind of stuff and for the hero cars the production team provided rnh with a lidar scan of each vehicle when the scans proved to be insufficient they then used an arm digitizer to get a better level of detail the models were then built in maya and in order to produce the shiny surfaces they rendered out at least two reflection passes for each cars an overall pass and one for the hotter edges this gave it realistic reflections the technical directors then spent a lot of time placing and timing the reflections on the car so that the cg models would perfectly blend with the background environment that's how much work that goes into these things with all the lit up storefronts and the multiple billboards in that square and the animated science it was a real challenge to get the reflections just right such intense work it's crazy the last touch to the shots was basically to add the smoke generated by the tires to do this particle animation was created in a program called houdini making use of rnh's in-house fluid simulator a program called ahab finally all the elements would be combined in programs like inferno shake and a proprietary compositing package called icy and that work was done by the 2d supervisor fellow by the name of harry lam and his team it's hard to get a grasp on how labor intensive this was until you see the plates that were shot in the parking lot near los angeles and then comparing them to the final results unbelievable 15 years later people are still shocked that this movie was filmed mostly right here in los angeles that's how seamless it was but with all of this said this is not to say that nothing was filmed in japan that's not the case some of the close-up shots and other shots that could be shot on the run were done and in some cases they was done bootleg style and when a japanese camera crew was available it made life much easier collectively the visual effects team and the production team worked together to bring a new sense of realism to the action sequences if the fast and furious franchise ever wins an oscar it'll probably be for visual effects and special effects i really think that few movies can match these and the effects are the best part of these movies in my humble opinion it's one of the main reasons why i go see the movie realistic or not so what do you think were the racing and the chasing sequences in the film the best in the franchise i think they were let me know what you think in the comments below that's it for this time everybody please don't forget to subscribe and don't forget to go through my previous video to get your fast and furious car and movie questions answered take care we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Craig Lieberman

Views: 79,482

Rating: 4.9648952 out of 5

Keywords: Tokyo Drift, Sung Kang, Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Movie making, The Fast and The Furious, Lil Bow Wow

Id: CNHT5XrQXbc

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 05 2021