From its first petrolhead installment, The Fast and the Furious, to its latest release, this franchise never fails to dazzle. Fast 8 set the record as the first Hollywood blockbuster to shoot in Cuba, one of the world’s most photogenic countries.
Fast 8 kicks off with a car chase sequence around the streets of Havana between a Cuban loan shark and Dom in a worn-out clown car. However, Dom wins spectacularly, as he always does, driving backward without brakes while being consumed in a fireball.
This opening sequence prepares the viewer for what is to come, and this film doesn’t disappoint. The tech features are prevalent in this franchise, and you should stream Fast & Furious movies to see the sort of bars these movies have set.
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The Incredible Fast and Furious 8
The Fast and Furious franchise is known for having probably the most outrageous scenes in filming. This fete would have been unachievable without using technology, and these are the top tech features of Fast and Furious 8.
Havana Racing Scene
Going back to the intro of F8, the Havana racing scene features a drag race where Dom uses an old clunker. However, the scene ‘picks up speed’ when he uses nitrous which sets the car’s engine on fire.
This forces him to race to the finish in reverse, where the brakes fail, and Dom has to jump out of the burning car before it hits a barrier.
The scene is 99 percent real, but the production team had to switch to CGI because the fire was getting into the car.
God’s Eye
God’s Eye was introduced in Furious 7 and is a hacking program that can infiltrate any technology with a camera. The program was created by a hacker known as Ramsey and gives the one in control the ability to collect information about anyone on the planet.
It’s a powerful tool that should be kept out of the hands of the bad guys, but that’s where it ends up. God’s Eye appears again in Fast 8 when the crew uses it to locate Dom. However, under Cypher’s control, Dom ambushes them and steals it again.
Until now, no tech is known to hack self-driving cars in mass.
Zero Day Exploit Car Hack
Fast and Furious 8 uses technology to create some of the most absurd moments in filmmaking. For instance, Cypher, who has control of God’s Eye, uses this tech to hack hundreds of cars in New York City and controls them like a horde of zombies.
The next scene is outrageous, even for the Fast and the Furious standards. Cypher uses New York as her playground. The amount of collateral damage Cypher leaves in her trail is out of this world, and people use it to showcase how far the franchise has fallen.
This scene didn’t take place in New York and was filmed in Cleveland. One shot, however, where a fleet of cars converged into an intersection was digitally enhanced. The rest is real; the production crew used about 18 vehicles for this scene.
However, using tech to create this scene wasn’t easy and cost a pretty penny.
Germany Wrecking Ball Scene
In this scene, Hobbs and the crew steal an EMP device, but the German officials are hot in pursuit. In pure Fast and Furious style, the only way to escape is not as straightforward as you think, as the group uses a wrecking ball to stop the pursuit.
The crew lures the officers into a construction area, where they narrowly diverge from the oncoming wrecking ball. The wrecking ball takes out every police vehicle behind them, creating a vehicle junkyard.
Seventy percent of this scene is real, and the rest is CGI which adds debris from the cars flying toward the cameras.
The Arctic Car Chase Finale
You’ll have to rewind or rewatch the final part of the Fast 8 to get the full extent of this scene known as the Arctic car chase finale. In this scene, Dom escapes a heat-seeking torpedo, but the scene that catches the eye is where he jumps over a submarine. He causes the torpedo to hit the sub instead of his vehicle.
This scene has a lot going on and took the stunt crew two months to complete. The scene was shot in Iceland, and the submarine is the only computer-generated addition.
The crew used a Phantom Camera to record all details of this scene. A type of camera that allows you to go up one thousand frames per second. The camera captures the moment the submarine hits Dom’s car; it’s rolling as it’s landing.
This shot occurs at normal speeds but also incorporates the one thousand frames per second shot, where the tire burns in the foreground.
Wrapping Up
The Fast and Furious franchise is popular among action and racing fans and amazes many with its out-of-this-world moments. Tech features like CGI and special cameras play a crucial role in pulling off these scenes, so which is your favorite?
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