The Get Out

The sequence opens with a practical barrier on location. Production removed one section of the barrier entirely, and we placed tracking markers on the remaining sections. We sent an on-set VFX supervisor to the night shoot to capture reference photography, chrome balls, and colour charts to inform the CG lighting. We painted out the practical barrier and replaced it with a rigged CG destruction model.

The 2011 Toyota Camry was built from a stock model and dressed with scrapes, dents, broken glass, and the production number plates. We animated the car skidding past camera losing traction, swinging through the corner with headlights sweeping across frame, then carrying through into the barrier. That animation is the foundation everything else is built on. In Houdini FX, the barrier destruction simulation is driven directly by the animated car geometry, so the barrier breaks exactly where and when the car hits it. The same animation drives the tyre smoke and dust sims, tying all the FX elements back to a single coherent piece of movement.

The car was mounted in the SFX beer can rig with stunt performers in the front seats and the camera locked in place on the rear seat. The whole rig rotated, so the glass, the hair, the performers all moved naturally with it. The rig was set up with a deliberate forward tilt so the rotation would feel off-axis, more like a real roll than a mechanical spin. We matched that in CG, building a sloped environment of grass, trees, and terrain, lit by a headlight camera rolling down the hill at the same off-axis angle.

A CG windscreen progressively cracked as we descended, reflecting and refracting the environment as it broke apart. Everything was composited in Nuke.

On location, a practical upside-down Camry sat waiting with SFX cables and crew pulling it to a halt. We painted out the cables and crew, then match moved our CG Camry over the practical car. The practical vehicle had some damage, but it needed to read as something that had just rolled down a hill. We added dents and scrapes across the body, bumper damage, and a broken rear axle with the wheel collapsed and the suspension visibly failed. Heavy dust was layered through the shot to sell the settling of the crash, alongside extra flame from the wheel well.

This ninety-second shot was one take, stitched together from plates across the length of the scene. The edit provided us with a jump cut to help time the performer's reaction to the explosion cue. We smoothed the jump cut in 2D using a paint and roto approach.

The practical explosion looked great, but the director wanted it bigger. We tested four or five elements from our 30TB library, built across years of fire and pyro work on productions including The Bluff and Nautilus, running each at native speed and offering them to the director. He chose the one that felt right.

The real magic came from the money. Our artists ran a Houdini FX simulation of bank notes blown into the air by the blast. As they caught fire they began to twinkle, hovering and drifting through the night air like burning embers. A strange moment of beauty inside the wreckage. We added more smoke around the vehicle throughout the shot, using the practical fire as a lighting source. We also built smoke out from within the vehicle itself, so the money and the embers had somewhere real to drift through.