The Flash was a great technical achievement in filmmaking. We used a mixture of 360 cameras, volumetric capture, and Unreal Engine to bring 2 versions of The Flash on screen at the same time.
Pre-Production
The pre-production for this project was unusual. I came on about halfway into it and it required us to figure out how to accurately project footage taken from a 360 camera onto an LED volume that surrounded the actor. The aim of this was to use the 360 camera footage to accurately light the actors in order to match the look from the day the footage was shot. We did this using some custom meshes and then Unreal Engine’s sequencer playback.
I helped build a tool to animate invisible cards, which would then turn on physical DMX lights to help light the actors. This was done using blueprints and pixel mapping.
Production
We shot principal photography with Ezra Miller, playing one version of The Flash and a stunt double playing the other version with a 360 camera rig attached so it could capture the perspective of the other Flash. We then brought this into Unreal Engine and projected it onto our LED Volume. We then got Ezra Miller in our volume to act out the part of the second flash against his initial performance during principal photography.
We had to adapt quickly to the director’s needs whilst shooting, which involved re-animation of light cards to achieve better lighting on the actors, adjusting the pixel mapping for the DMX, fixing artifacts on the footage, and working with the editor to re-time sequences.
