A tennis match, you might wonder, is one of the year’s most intriguing special effects images.
The tennis film Challengers, which stars Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor, is not the first movie that comes to mind when your mind is prompted to think about visual effects. Nevertheless, the movie makes use of them to an unexpected degree: One particular scene, a volley between two of the protagonists that lasted for twenty-four seconds and was filmed from the perspective of the ball, utilized a significant amount of digital and physical effects, as the visual effects supervisor Brian Drewes revealed on X.
Drewes claims that the live plates were captured with an Arri Alexa LF on a thirty-foot technocrane over the course of five hours with the assistance of stunt doubles when they were being filmed. In order to produce the final sequence, 23 separate shots were pieced together using stitching.
Love it or hate it, you have to admit, it’s a new way to see tennis!
— Brian Drewes (@BrianVFX) May 23, 2024
I oversaw all VFX on Challengers and thanks to great direction from Luca and amazing artists @ZeroVFX it’s unlike any sports movie ever made!
More breakdowns to come. Go watch the movie on Prime!!! pic.twitter.com/eu4lnlnhaD
For the purpose of assisting in the creation of the final models, extremely detailed LiDAR and photogrammetry scans of the surroundings surrounding the tennis court were taken. In addition, more than one hundred performers and background extras were photoscanned in order to populate the stands of our computer-generated scenario, as stated by Drewes.
Following that, computer graphics were utilized to smooth out camera motion and rectify fluctuations in the time of day. After that, the faces of the stunt doubles were changed “with a combination of full CG heads and additional photography,” as Drewes said further.
The question is, why do all of that? The segment seems to have been aimed to represent the speed, confusion, and emotion that are displayed in the sport, which is consistent with the general themes of the film. The fact that it is a cool and engaging method to portray what would otherwise be a typical tennis match is another interesting aspect of it.