The audience is likely to be surprised by two things when they see Joseph KosinskiS “F1.“One, that a huge percentage of filmDrama and actual driving time, especially compared to the usual Hollywood sports movie, takes place on The race track. Two, that the competition films are extremely realistic.
As has been reported and published generally Apple-Backed film produced by legendary driver Lewis Hamilton (for non-racing fans this is the equivalent of LeBron James Producing a basketball film with actual NBA players and teams) struck a partnership with Formula One to shoot during their biggest competitions, including some time with the film’s stars, Brad Pitt And Damson Idris (who spent months of pre -production learning how to drive a 200 mph racing car), behind the steering wheel.
And while everything that is true and an important aspect of how the film was made, it does not quite explain how our heroes’ fictional APXGP, or Apex, the race team was integrated into seasons 2023 and 2024.
What follows? A division of what you need to know about how “F1“Was actually done.
And if you want to listen to the director Joseph Kosinski Discuss the creation of “F1”, the whole conversation is below, or subscribe to Filmmaker tolkit podcast on AppleThe SpotifyOr wherever podcast is available.
Access and partnership
When the “F1” creative team, led by Kosinski, Pitt, Hamiliton and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, convinced the Racing League that they tried to realistically capture the speed and behind the scenes to create a movie that they thought they would promote the sports association.
Tim Bampton, who worked for three decades in professional sports, was employed as an executive producer to monitor and lead the integration of the film and racing. The asset was really outstanding, with the huge top team traveling from city to city, built its garage and got ready for next week with the other racing teams.
This enabled “F1” to arrange its film against the electric atmosphere in the world’s fastest cars that rush past the crowds of 300,000 plus on legendary paths that unique weaves through iconic places such as Las Vegas and Budapest. It is the production value that even a movie of 200 plus millions that “F1” cannot afford, and that visual effects cannot replicate.
2023 and 2024 Formula One Seasons
“F1” has nine actual races, and racing fans will recognize memorable moments, such as Chechos turn a collision in Mexico, or Ocon and Gasly collides in the first corner of Hungary, which was integrated into the film. Kosinski promised that his fictional film would preserve each (with a remarkable exception) of the actual race’s top charts, which was not a victim of a story of an underdog team at the bottom of the position and fought for its much survival.
The original plan was to shoot the entire film during the race 2023, but actor Here right when production had started. The SAG work stop meant that Kosinski’s team would shoot 38 days racing during the 2023 season and then return for the 2024 season to shoot with the actors. While the strike was a devastating blow to the already expensive production, Kosinski told IndieWire that the film favored by the Split Season method, which allowed them to edit between the seasons and return to the famous tracks in 2024, and knew how, where and what exactly was needed to end the film.
Shooting in 10-minute intervals
Bampton established a indicative rule for production: it could never interfere with the integrity of the sports competition. This meant that the “F1” team needed to be to take advantage of every five to 15 minutes break in the action. Actors and crew needed to be prepared to quickly make a shot for a while.
“It’s like making a live -show. Brad and Damson would be in the cars, the tires hot, engines hot, at the gates ready to get out. As soon as the exercise or qualification session ended, they would pull out on the track and shoot their sequences,” Kosinski said. The director also pointed to an important dramatic scene that takes place at the net (where racing cars are located before the race begins) just before the start of a race, that they had an eight -minute window to shoot. “It meant repeating with the camera with a stopwatch for weeks in advance, knowing where everyone needed to stand, so that the actors go right into our coverage. It was a completely different movie style.”
“In the cockpit” with Sony Carmen
One of the keys to the success of Kosinski’s “Top Gun: Maverick” put the audience in the cockpit itself to experience the speed and power of a FA-18 plane. The goal of “F1” was similar, but an important difference is an aircraft flying Mach 1.6 is not emphasized by the weight of 50 kilos of camera equipment (The trick there was how to safely attach it), but that is not the case for the formula Race cars where every supplement pound and adaptation to its aerodynamics really matters.
Kosinski would need a system with multiple cameras that could get several angles, and it was extremely small and light, and he could move (boiler and inclination to update compositions). To achieve this, kinematographer Claudio Miranda Collaborated with Sony to create a new piece of camera technology now called “Carmen”, which according to Kosinski is mainly a “sensor on a stick.”
Fifteen Sony Carmen -Camera Companies were placed in different positions around the top cars to catch Pitt and Idris driving. The camera bodies, batteries and RF equipment (to send out the radio signal with Video Village) were then built on the floor in the car itself.
Apple iPhone and F1 on board cameras
A camera angle Racecar fans will be familiar with from TV is the camera’s skis on board, which is placed behind the driver’s helmet, facing the windshield. The broadcasting films at 720p quality, which have a slightly hidden camera-like feel on TV, are not of a quality “F1” can use on the big screen, but the filmmaking team worked with Apple to use the iPhone camera’s sensor, chip and iOS software to build a camera that was similar in size as on the camera pod.
And then – and this is huge – Formula 1 actually lets the filmmakers put the new Apple camera in two to three of the real racing cars (not just the fictional top cars) during the competitions.
Kosinski could expect to have between 30 to 35 camera angles in the race itself. About 16 of these came from the production’s bio cameras, but using TV broadcast cameras presented challenges. Like many sports, they shoot the Formula 1 race with a high speed of fast shutter speed to avoid motion of motion (which is twice as important for Formula 1, which must keep all different sponsors’ logos visible). There is hyper reality and clarity in the image that is not very cinematic, not to say anything about how it is compressed so that it can be radiated in real time all over the world.
“I made them change the shutter angle for me, and we could catch the 4K flow before it was broadcast or sent over air and compressed,” Kosinski explained. “We could put raw recorders on these cameras and make up to 20 of their track cameras in an uncompressed format, which we did at every race.”
VFX and Overkin cars
To integrate the APEX team’s two cars into the actual competitions, the “F1” VFX team “Re-skin” (a technology developed for “Top Gun: Maverick”) would be one of the real racing cars in one of the black and golden pex cars.
After each race, the editorial staff would comb through and log in every event in the race, so that when editor Stephen Mirrione, for example, needed a shot of a car that passes another car on the right side, he could quickly access the different options from to Especially race (Kosinski said that Lewis Hamilton was just too eagle eyes and knowledgeable about each track to let the filmmakers get away with cheating by reusing pictures from different breeds).
“We would cut the real pictures from the real race (into the movie) and we would put these little” bugs “, these little logo, on the car that we would turn into a top car,” Kosinski said. “And that’s how I watched the movie for a year and a half, with all these small floating logos everywhere, which for someone else would be completely injectable, but when I had undertaken that the shots, visual effects would be-skin.”
Exposition and the announces
Each of the film’s race has a narrative bow, which often hangs on the viewer and understands the nuances and strategy for car racing. While the goal was to make a movie racing fans could appreciate, it was just as important for summer blockbuster not to lose the relaxed movie guest.
Therefore, “F1” was constantly facing exposure problems – taking time to explain things to an audience can stop a story and remove the viewer from the engrossing experience. To solve the exhibition problem, the filmmakers recruited Sky Sports Supplies David Croft and Martin Brundle to play themselves.
“I noticed (Croft and Brundle) do this fantastic thing where they mention the basics, so that if someone agrees for the first time you get the cheats you need to know,” Kosinski said. “But for the Diehard fans, they are the voice of the sport, so it feels genuine.”
The announcer was introduced during the post -production and recorded 19 hours Voiceover for the filmmakers to then play in the editing room.
Using F2 cars
Using real F1 cars for Pitt and Idris’ Apex team was impossible. “A Formula One car requires about 30 people to start it and costs about $ 250,000 a day to run it,” Kosinski said. “A Formula Two car can be started by two people and costs about $ 30,000 a day to drive, and you get 90 percent of the performance (from an F1 car).”
As Kosinski explained, 90 percent of the performance was good – stars Pitt pointed out and Idris had no business in the upper 10 percent of the performance. So the production bought six F2 cars and sent them to the Mercedes F1 factory so that its engineers and technicians could change them to look like F1 cars and equip them for filmmaking.
To hear Joseph Kosinski’s full interview, subscribe to filmmaker Toolkit podcast on AppleThe SpotifyOr your favorite podcast platform
