What's the perfect escape vehicle? For members of a special forces group wrongly accused of a crime in The A-Team, out June 11, it's a military C-130J airplane. But for filmmakers who planned to shoot the pivotal escape sequence on a Canadian air force base in Cold Lake, Alberta, that posed a bit of a problem. "There were a lot of F-18s in the background that we incorporated into the scene, but we didn't actually have a C130," VFX supervisor James Price says. "So we decided to go with a visual-effect solution."

The minute-long escape sequence called not only for an establishing shot of the fully digital C-130J, but also for the plane to engage in a game of chicken with a Mercedes Benz SUV and move in front of—and, in some cases, between—real F-18s. Plus, director Joe Carnahan wanted close-ups. "Usually there's a threshold for how close you want to get to digital objects," Price says. "But we took ours to full frame and beyond."

Carnahan thinks he had good reason to go above and beyond. "If you're going to make a movie like this and you're not audacious about your choice of stunt or what you're trying to do, then what's the point?" he says. "I don't want to rehash something that's been done a billion times. I want people to come out and say, 'I've never seen anything like that.' If you're able to do that, you're giving people their money's worth."

Price's team couldn't get access to a real C-130J to photograph for reference, so they used the next best thing: Pictures and video provided by the film's military advisor, plus reference on graphics and markings on the plane from the art department, which they sent to the visual-effects experts at Weta Digital in New Zealand. As the live-action sequence was being shot—with all of the background action but none of the scene's visual-effects elements—animators were building the entire C-130J, including fully functional landing gear. "Although we never did a shot where the landing gear had to retract, we built it and rigged it so that it could do the natural things that an airplane would do as it was going down the runway," Price says. Animators built the wings to flex so there was motion on the wing-tips as the plane moved down the runway, added special texture to the propellers so the blades wouldn't disappear as they started to turn, and added exhaust coming out of the engines. Because Carnahan wanted extreme close-ups, special attention was paid to the texture of the materials on the plane.

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The C-130 wasn't the only thing visual-effects artists had to create. One part of the sequence—which VFX artists came up with while they were out on location—called for the wings of the C-130 to shear off the canopies of the surrounding F-18s so the A-Team couldn't be chased. "We asked the Air Force personnel to raise all the canopies to the F18s, and then we [filmed] them," Price says. "We ended up painting them all out and replaced them with digital ones. Then we rigged them with dynamics and glass so that they would shatter as the wings of the digital C130 impacted them going down the runway."

Initially, the animators constructed each element of the scene to the numbers, but they always had to walk a fine line between what was accurate and what was most interesting visually. The canopies of the F-18s, for example, had three times as much glass as real life canopies to create a more dramatic shatter. The C-130J was tweaked, too. "It will look to the audience like it's the same plane going down the runway in every shot," Price says. "But if you were to look at all the measurements in the computer, you would find that the plane is moving left or right or being scaled up a little bit from shot to shot, or even moving at different speeds in order to make each individual shot dramatic."

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