Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B Stein put together a terrific pitch and highly entertaining pitch to get the directing gig on in Final Destination Bloodlines. (read our review HERE) During a now infamous Zoom meeting Zadam set up a gag in which a fire broke out in the room they were in. They managed to put it out, only to have the ceiling fan come crashing down and appear to chop Stein’s head off! (They got the job.) So from 4th March to 6th May 2024, FINAL DESTINATION BLOODLINES filmed for 45 days in and around Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada with a 2nd unit shooting concurrently for an additional 14 days. And the film opens with an outstanding set piece with the skyview restaurant disaster.
The film begins in 1969 with a young couple, Iris and Paul, arriving at the grand opening of the spectacular Skyview Restaurant, high atop a 500-foot steel-beamed tower. The monumental Skyview is the setting for the film’s opening premonition of catastrophic disaster and, to capture the multitude of horrors that befall the restaurant’s patrons, the Skyview sequence shot for 20 days (13 on Main Unit and seven on 2nd Unit) on nine different sets.
The fabulous, state-of-the-art 1969 Skyview Restaurant was actually built to replicate a pinball machine. Production designer Rachel O’Toole designed it with circles and curves, lights that look like pinballs, and seats and benches that act like bumpers once things start going haywire. The look of the Skyview was heavily inspired by the iconic 1960s Trans World Airlines Flight Center at John F. Kenney Airport in New York, designed by famous Mid-Century architect Eero Saarinen. The Skyview feels elegant and modern and flows beautifully… until the chaos starts. Then, the furniture slides and gathers along the S-curves, and when the restaurant starts to tilt, the people slide and bump like pinballs… until they fall out of the machine.
The Skyview set takes advantage of LED volume wall technology, where a system of LED panels displays video or 3D content in the background while live action is being filmed in the foreground. Often when filming on volume sets, there’s a small practical set that’s extended virtually. But the Skyview restaurant set was an enormous build, measuring 80 feet in diameter. Adam B. Stein says, “I think it’s one of the biggest sets that’s ever been built inside of a volume.”
The Skyview restaurant disaster boasts massive windows that allow for a magnificent 360° view, courtesy of the LED virtual volume wall. Visual effects supervisor Nordin Rahhali describes the volume: “Imagine having a seamless, edgeless version of your LED TV, and a ton of them all strapped together, like Lego blocks building up a wall that becomes a much, much larger TV. The entire wall is a TV. Ours was a semicircle, surrounding the set. It was a 30-foot-high wall, driven by a whole rack of servers and computers running Unreal Engine, a video game engine, that powered the set in real time. We built the largest volume in North America. It was big, 80 feet in diameter and 30 feet tall. The volume can create content with perspective that matches the cameras running through it, so the background can move. Birds and planes fly, water ripples, and the perspective of the buildings in the background actually change the viewpoint as the camera runs in real time. That is what is so exciting about this technology.”
Visual effects and virtual production studio Pixomondo custom-built the volume surrounding the Skyview. Pixomondo also served one of the houses handling visual effects through postproduction.
Production included many state-of-the-art practical effects, as well as at least one tried and true old-school effect, affectionately termed the “Star Trek” process on set. To film a portion of Iris’ premonition, when the Skyview floor begins to break apart, the actors moved as if the floor were tilting, the furniture was pulled so it appeared to slide, the camera tilted, and the video on the volume wall moved in sync, all to make it look like the building was shifting. And just like in the classic original Star Trek series, when the Enterprise took a hit and the actors on the bridge would move to imitate the effect, the whole process gave the Skyview the appearance that it was shaking, too.
The Skyview Restaurant disaster was created and filmed across nine different sets, one of which was a portion of the floor tilted at a 30-degree angle. Everyone working on that set had to be tethered, or they would literally roll down to the windows below.
The set piece had some of the most intensive days filming when there were more than 150 actors and stunt and background performers on the set, dressed in period hair, wardrobe and makeup. On some of those days, makeup head Christopher Pinhey, hair head Julie McHaffie and costume designer Michelle Hunter and their combined teams numbered more than 60 crew members.
How they made the skyview restaurant disaster in Final Destination Bloodlines!
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