In F1 The Movie, Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a race car driver that was predicted to dominate the 1990s Formula 1 circuit, only to have an accident nearly end his career. It's been 30 years, and his former teammate Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) is hoping Hayes can help save the struggling Formula 1 team he manages. For Hayes, it would be a second chance at showcasing his talents at racing's highest level. He’ll drive alongside Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), a hot-shot rookie intent on setting his own pace and hardly impressed with Hayes' resume.
The Apple Original Films release was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer directed by Joseph Kosinski, who brought Top Gun: Maverick to the big screen three summers ago. Kosinski assembled a team of past collaborators to pull off
F1 The Movie's late June release, including director of photography Claudio Miranda, ASC; editor Stephen Mirrione, ACE; and visual effects supervisor Ryan Tudhope. The film features a musical score by Hans Zimmer.
EDITING
Stephen Mirrione, ACE, worked with Kosinski on 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick and
Spiderhead.
“Joe and I became close on those two and are continuing,” says Mirrione of their collaboration.
The Formula 1 schedule spans more than 20 international races from March through December. Race teams compete in places such as Australia, Japan, Canada, Spain, Austria, Abu Dhabi, Great Britain, Mexico, Brazil and Quatar. In the United States, there are races in Miami and Las Vegas. The movie incorporates footage from many of the international broadcasts, as well as new material shot specifically for the film. Director of photography, Claudio Miranda, ASC, would capture original material with real race cars in the days leading up to and after the actual F1 race. Broadcast footage would be enhanced with visual effects that included re-skinned cars with new sponsor logos, and entirely digital vehicles. Framestore and ILM handled the majority of the effects work.
Mirrione points out that the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike threw that filmmaking team’s initial plan by the wayside. They would not be able to capture any of the narrative material for the film, nor the actors during the race sequences.
“Originally, the plan was most of the dramatic scenes were going to be shot in and around a particular track, maybe the week before (or) the week after the Grand Prix itself,” he shares. “We would have sets setup there, and they'd be also getting to use the track at various times before the Grand Prix weekend.”
However, the strike began just after they started shooting in Silverstone, the UK stop on the circuit.
“Because we didn't have actors now to do any of that, or actors to do the racing they needed to do…we had to come up with another plan,” Mirrione reveals. “Nobody knew how long the strike was going to last.”
While the strike’s duration was unknown at the time, the race schedule continued on.
“We would be able to capture a lot of our stunt driving material - the stuff that didn't involve the actors,” he shares. “We'd be able to get some of our pit-wall stuff, and we'd get all our broadcast camera stuff. Then, with my crew, we could start cutting that all together for inevitably when we would have to come back the following summer…My crew stayed on and we just augmented how we were doing things. It really became cataloging the race footage I would then be cutting with storyboards.”
Mirrione would begin putting together race scenes, taking into consideration story points, the cars’ positions, and that material would ultimately be enhanced with VFX.
“We're basically doing a pretty good pass of what the race will be, making sure we've got all the story points,” he explains. “Knowing that once we get an actual performance from Brad and Damson, and whatever is happening with the moves that their cars are making, that that's going to change slightly…When you've worked on a few VFX movies, you understand that [you’re] going to cut things together a little bit looser, a little bit fatter, because until you start to get those shots back, you're not exactly sure what's going to work?”
The production had an editorial trailer with Avid systems that would move from race to race as the F1 schedule progressed. There was also an editing suite in the UK that would handle the dailies coming in from Silverstone.
“I was at Silverstone just for the first week or so, just to kind of make sure everything was working and moving properly, and to have some time with Joe (Kosinski),” Mirrione recalls. “But the plan was always that after that, I'd be coming back to LA, because what would happen then is, all the material that would get to the UK editing room would then be cataloged, organized, setup in a way so that I can cut with it, so that when I'm waking up, that editing room is going to sleep. My assistant in LA is then helping me when I wake up. The same with the VFX editor. So we were really 24 hours.”
During production, Mirrione only had limited time with Kosinski (pictured above).
“When a director's shooting, they don't usually have time to hang out in the editing room,” he shares. “By the same token, I need time to hang out with the material, be alone with it, be in a kind of a focused space to really do the work that I need to do. So we were able to get both sides of this, that way when Joe would wake up, I'd usually have cuts ready, and I could go online with him and play them for him. And when he was finishing his day, I'd be waking up and we could do the same, so we were still working together every few days.”
Because of the enormous volume of material – the race broadcast covered each event with 20-plus cameras – and the need to access footage via the internet, Mirrione work at just 720p resolution while cutting on his Avid, even though the feature would ultimately get an IMAX release.
“Joe is just allergic to that resolution,” he jokes. “It was driving him crazy, but I'm like, ‘Trust me, Here's the plan.”
Within the week of the footage being shot, he could catalog it, cut it and find the high-resolution versions that he needed, which his team would then download.
“You're talking about less than a minute or so of material, versus hours and hours and hours,” he says of the workflow.
The team relied on LucidLink, which specializes in allowing editing teams to quickly access material regardless of its format, size or distance.
“Instead of creating media for the Avid, we could AMA (Avid Media Access) it, which means it's just pointing to the file,” he explains. “And then I could view it. People could mark it up…they would put locators for me. Every time a car passed another car, they'd put a little note for me. There's no other way we could have feasibly gotten through it all. It just would have been so extreme, the amount of material.”
Some of the race sequences that he turned over to the VFX team wouldn’t come back to him for as long as six months. But as the film’s deadline neared, the floodgates opened, and he was receiving between 10 and 20 completed VFX shots each week.
“Framestore and ILM, who did all the work, they were just on it,” he notes. “Things came in really close all the time. They were very dialed in, and I suspect a lot of that came from them having already done a lot of the work on Top Gun and Ryan (Tudhope) kind of designing and guiding (the workflow). That was very smooth once shots started coming in.”
Hans Zimmer’s score sets the tone for the film during the title sequence.
“The whole opening sequence, with the Josh Pierce character doing his warm-up laps, that was cut and done, and there weren't very many visual effects with that because it's just the car on the track,” Mirrione shares. “There were no fans or other cars that had to be comped in, so that was a sequence that was done, and we gave that to Hans like two years ago.”
By the time they started shooting again the following summer, Zimmer had provided a number of tracks that were finding their places throughout the film.
“What was really interesting to me is, a lot of the things that were rejected from the first few sessions that were done, when I started cutting Abu Dhabi, I was remembering those pieces,” says Mirrione of the initial trakcs being considered for the film’s open. “One of the reasons they were rejected was maybe because they were too dark or too this or too that. And it wasn't right for the opening of the movie. But as I was cutting Abu Dhabi, I was thinking, ‘You know, maybe those old demos could work here?’ And as I started dropping them in, it's like, ‘Oh my gosh!’ They had to massage it. They had to make adjustments, but he had essentially written the score for Abu Dhabi a year before. It actually worked somewhere. I keep everything - all the little strands and stems - and we had a great music editor (Chris Newlin) working with us, who also had access to all that. We would just keep adjusting and reshaping, sending that back to them for reference, then they would redo it, send theirs back to us, and just collaborate back and forth the whole way through.”
The final edit was completed roughly six or seven weeks prior to the film’s June release.
“I think we had to extend the deadline by like a week or so for a couple of shots,” he recalls, pointing to a competitive race sequence between the fictional APXGP team and the powerhouse Ferrari team.
“You're not seeing it,” he shares of the initial edit’s storytelling component. “I didn't cut a shot in, and it just feels so unsatisfying…He's passing and getting into second place, and I don't actually see it happen. So, my team and I went digging through all the material of Abu Dhabi we can find. A loose shot that actually shows the moment happening. And we found it! And VFX, they figured out how to get it done in time for us, and it completely, completely saved that sequence, in my opinion.”