Behind the Scenes: Fast and Furious (Patreon)

I mentioned this before, but it's a good habit to repeat some information for the new subscribers. I keep a list of ideas to do and built a habit of writing everything down. So if I come across a comment on YT with a nice idea suggestion, in the list it goes.

As you can imagine, over the four year I do this, my list got a bit unwieldy. So I go back to it periodically and clean up. Remove things, that are no longer relevant, or push forward things that got forgotten.

One of those was a Fast and Furious reference. Over the years, the movie series became iconic (for both good and bad) and transformed itself from a car enthusiast action movie into a full blown heist action flick. But as I realized I never done anything from F&F, the scene selection was pretty obvious.

The Charger.

Visit the full Pinboard here

It's that moment, when the movie stopped being about Brian (R.I.P), but focused on Toretto and "the family". The moment the barn opened and 900 hp charger came out doing wheelies, the future of F&F was set.

I searched for all the reference I could find, but apart from million views of the car itself, it was hard to find a good material on the barn car shop. Anytime this happens and it's a movie scene, I just look up that scene and play it few times over while doing screenshots. I paste all of them in the PureRef (image reference organizer) and build a mood board.

When I clip these images, I always focus on the details and create a palette.

Since my illustrations are almost always presented as standalone isolated diorama scenes, some liberties have to be taken to make it work. For example, I almost never get to re-create the original space or room in a way it existed in the movie.

That's why the details and mood palette is essential. I always sketch the scene, so I know what to expect when modeling, so I started with the basic room blockout and placed the car in there. After that, it's time for all the details from the mood catalogue.

I go over the scene and find good spots to place them in a similar way I saw them in the original scene. This way, even if the final layout has nothing to do with the original, I still get to create the mood and feeling of the movie.

After that, it's time to bring the car blueprint into Blender and start building the rest of the scene.

You can watch the process video on Youtube