One of the best movies of the year hinges not only on the chemistry between actors, but also the ability for VFX people to make the tennis look real, and make it look like the actors were really playing tennis.

A new behind-the-scenes look at Challengers reveals the incredible visual effects work that brought the film’s tennis courts, dramatic moments, and intense rivalries to life. If you thought the movie was thrilling, this is going to blow you away.

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The awesome publication Before And Afters Magazine took an intricate deep dive into intricate how the Challengers tennis scenes were built with VFX. Obviously, the actors trained for the film, but VFX techniques were used to make their movements look more professional and their shots, more accurate.

VFX artists replaced stunt doubles’ faces in some scenes, layering the actors on them. They also used VFX to create CG tennis balls and courts. That being said, little VFX was integrated for most of the film’s visual effects.

Visual effects supervisor Brian Drewes told the publication:

“The actors worked extraordinarily hard on things, as far as their training and the routines that they would follow. But we knew from the beginning that we really wanted to be in close with them. We wanted the camera to be really kinetic. In fact, we were shooting tennis in a different style than anything has ever been shot, I think, including that final crazy scene where we take the point of view of the ball.

“During filming, the stunt doubles would go first wearing dots on their faces, since that was always really good reference for the tennis action,” continues Drewes. “It also helped the camera team map out exactly how they were going to work out that specific beat. Everything was pre-planned, down to the tee, with storyboards. Every tennis moment was scripted and storyboarded. Then we would have the actors walk on and do the best that they could. They did a great job of matching to the doubles.”

When it came to replacing the faces, Dewes said, “We also keyframe animated all the faces, once we had those in place, and we had some occlusions to deal with as well where tennis rackets are swiping over faces. That’s when we applied the machine learning process on top of the 3D in order to really get that next few percent that really locked in all the facial features that you would expect to see from the actor.”

In terms of the gameplay, Dewes talked about how it was working with the director. “Luca really wanted to be close to the action and to give the audience some moments of ‘What just happened?’ So we had a bunch of shots where the camera would’ve been so close to our actor’s swings that they would’ve nailed it with the tennis racket. We ended up shaving off and just giving them the stump of the racket to use for these shots and then we tracked the CG racket onto it. I think it just really pulls you in as the viewer when you’re seeing those shots. It doesn’t feel like a visual effect. It just feels like, ‘Oh, that was a cool way to film it.’ Whereas, in fact, those moments generally were enhanced by visual effects.”

This was an incredible look at how much effort was put into this movie. I really thought it excelled on each level, and I’m excited to see how it fares during awards season.

Let me know what you think in the comments.