Laughs, Camera, Action!

For the PFX team, the first step to working on The Naked Gun was to establish a total shift in mindset and approach. “The Naked Gun centres on Neeson’s Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr., who must follow in his father’s footsteps and prevent the closure of Police Squad,” adds Javier Menendez, VFX Supervisor at PFX. “Throughout the story, Neeson’s character gets himself into these unbelievable situations and consistently breaks the fourth wall. Our goal was to support this humor and storytelling. To do that, we all needed to focus less on realism and solely on what made each sequence fun and engaging for the audience.”

He explains that not every VFX shot needed to be pixel-perfect; in fact, a slightly exaggerated or imperfect element often enhanced the humor. For example, an action sequence sees Lieutenant Drebin summon an owl, on which he flies into action. For two shots, PFX was tasked with creating the digital owl, using Yeti to groom its feathers, and Houdini for efficient look development. For the other shots, the team composited in the original owl puppet used during production. “Even if it looked fake, we felt that for some shots, it was funnier than the CGI owl, as the CGI owl looked more realistic,” says Menendez. “By playing up the more fake-looking owl’s contrast with its surroundings, the artists created a laugh-out-loud spectacle.”

Timing is Everything

To enhance the slapstick humour of the film even further, the PFX team also built a flexible workflow that allowed Schaffer to land the pacing of each joke. This was crucial considering the film’s plentiful background in-jokes and sight gags in every scene, telling five jokes where one would normally be. By creating a flexible VFX workflow, Schaffer could flexibly tweak timing and delivery in post-production, ensuring every visual gag landed perfectly. To do this, the PFX team used its in-house Crossbow app, which enabled artists to compare, update and readjust shots at a moment’s notice.

For the film’s climactic action scene, however, the team needed to take timing even more seriously. “This scene sees Neeson using guns and hand-to-hand combat to fight villainous goons, often to hilarious effect,” explains Menendez. “The action demanded digital doubles to perform certain feats, and PFX worked closely with Schaffer and editor Brian Scott Olds to coordinate these VFX shots around fast-paced action, complex timing and precise comedic beats. One second can be the difference between a gag landing and falling completely flat, so the digital doubles needed to help and not hinder the comedy.”

Knowing that keyframe animation couldn’t achieve the desired movements in time, PFX ran two motion capture shoots at a studio. PFX then collaborated with the stunt team to capture full-body data of high-energy actions, such as dives, rolls, and close-quarters combat, resulting in a library of high-fidelity, physics-based actions that could be retargeted onto digital characters. Compositing also presented a unique challenge, due to a significant use of camera retiming to achieve slow-motion and speed-up effects during the action. PFX used custom Nuke scripts to manage camera retiming and Topaz to extend frame ranges so that more details could be added to the retime. This ensured the film’s 3D animation and rendering were perfectly synced up with the camera moment to moment.

Cinematic Legacy

Now that work on The Naked Gun is complete, the PFX team is proud to have created VFX that stayed true to the spirit of the original, while still creating something new and modern that audiences would love. “Working on Naked Gun was an incredible experience for the entire PFX team,” says Menendez. “We had a great relationship with Paramount and with VFX supervisor Ash Bettini and her team, which helped us to create a very inspirational and friendly environment that allowed for editing changes and demanding last-minute tasks. Over the course of a year, we had the pleasure of contributing to the long-awaited sequel to a truly iconic comedy, a genre that’s both challenging and deeply rewarding for VFX.”

“In the end, I believe our work captured the spirit of the original movie, balancing absurdity with precision, to deliver something both nostalgic and fresh,” agrees Vinnik. “It’s not every day you get to work on such a funny, unique project like The Naked Gun, and every hour we spent helping to achieve every laugh and smile in the cinema was worth it.”