Following are excerpts from a Q&A with the R&H team

What are the VFX highlights of Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift?
Rhythm & Hues was assigned several key VFX sequences in the movie and each sequence had its own set of challenges. R&H's Co-VFX supervisors Raymond Chen and Michael Meaker did a wonderful job of guiding the R&H crew in both Los Angeles and Mumbai through these challenges.

Creation of the people & the streets of Tokyo Image courtesy of Rhythm & Hues. © NBC/Universal

For example, one of the most complex sequences in the movie involves a car race through Shibuya Square in downtown Tokyo. Shibuya Square is usually a very crowded and busy area of Tokyo, so it was not feasible to shut down that area for filming the car race. Rhythm & Hues was tasked with digitally recreating the sequence with a combination of CG cars, CG crowds of over 6000 people, a 3D city, and digital facades that were added after the sequence was shot in a recreated set erected in a Los Angeles parking lot.

"It was a huge undertaking as we needed not only to build a 3D representation of Shibuya Square, but also create crowds of people as well as 3D cars," Raymond Chen explained.

"Production provided us with various elements, including LIDAR scans of the real Shibuya Square and the tarmac set used to stand in for Shibuya, thousands of high-resolution photographs of the actual location, and running footage of the camera car driving through the real square." The challenge was to combine all these elements into a seamless photo-real visual effects sequence and the end results are quite spectacular.

What part of the work was done in India?

As with most productions at R&H now, there has been more and more integration between the Los Angeles and Mumbai facilities. We don't really think of it as which shots were done at which facility but rather we approach the production as one combined team of artists tackling the challenges and specific tasks at hand to complete the shots.

Vfx contributing to exciting action Image courtesy of Rhythm & Hues. © NBC/Universal

On FF3 in particular the artists in Mumbai worked on several stages of the pipeline and tasks throughout the movie. For example, some modeling artists in India were involved in creating detailed film quality 3D models of cars like the Mazda RX 7, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VII, Nissan 350Z & the Toyota Porte. While another example of work done in Mumbai is in the discipline of compositing that was led by 2D Supervisor Harry Lam.

Specifically, there were a lot of shots of actors racing their cars on a green screen stage which required the background to be replaced with moving footage of Tokyo. We needed the flexibility to pick any green screen shot with any camera move that worked best with the edit without having to worry about finding the exact same camera move for the background elements.

Cars race through a virtual Japan in Fast & The Furious :Tokyo Drift Image courtesy of Rhythm & Hues. © NBC/Universal

To do this the compositors needed to "stitch together" background footage from several cameras and use a 3D camera in our compositing software (Icy) to align the background with the foreground action. The background footage for the car chase sequences were shot with a special camera rig that was designed by VFX supervisor Mike Wassel. He used a double array of three Arriflex 435 's equipped with 20mm lenses, which created a 150° field of view per camera set. This rig allowed objects to get very close to the camera, without parallax becoming a problem after stitching the imagery together from the various cameras. The compositors could then use the stitched backgrounds as a large canvas of live footage over which they could move the 3D camera to match the real camera.

Cars race through a virtual Japan in Fast & The Furious :Tokyo Drift Image courtesy of Rhythm & Hues. © NBC/Universal

How was the artist experience working on FF3?
FF3 was a fun project for us as we got to experiment with several new techniques and new features in our internal software. It is truly amazing to see the "before" and "after" of most of these shots, particularly the Tokyo race sequence because there are so many "invisible" effects that you often believe that you seeing the real thing. Overall the production went very smoothly with very few problems and with little need for artists to work any late hours or weekends. This was especially good, because we were also working on the VFX and animation on Superman Returns, Garfield 2, and Charlotte's Web at the same time and we didn't want any complications from one movie affecting the other projects.

What is next for R&H?
These are very exciting times for us at R&H. We have several great feature films for 2006 and 2007 that we are working on. We have just successfully finished our work on "Charlotte's Web" for Paramount and "Garfield a Tale of Two Kitties" for Fox (both should release later this year in India). We are now working on 5 Hollywood feature film projects for various clients. These include, "A Night at the Museum" with Ben Stiller for Fox, "Evan Almighty" (The sequel to Bruce Almighty) for Universal, "Happy Feet" (a Full CGI animated feature about Penguins) for Warner Brothers, and "The Kingdom" with Jamie Foxx for Universal. Finally, the big project that we are all excited about at R&H is the very ambitious "His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass" for Newline which will be releasing in December of 2007.