The Lost Bus

Project Overview

Set during the catastrophic wildfires that ravaged California in 2018, Paul Greengrass’s disaster thriller The Lost Bus is based on the true story of a school driver and two teachers who brought a bus load of children out of the fire and into safety.

The film demanded a significant amount of visual effects work to truly immerse audiences, with major requirements including fire FX, smoke, environments and more.

Working alongside client-side VFX Supervisor Charlie Noble and VFX Producer Gavin Round, Outpost VFX delivered around 200 complex shots for the film under the creative leadership of internal VFX Supervisor, John McLaren.

“The big sequence for Outpost was the trailer park sequence, which took up in the region of between 100 and 120 shots,” McLaren begins. “Our second big sequence was the final sequence of the film where we see the destruction left behind by the wildfires.

“In between we had a number of shots with large smoke plumes and clouds. Then there were various others where we'd be adding vehicles, adding windy trees, adding blowing debris, and then some straightforward stuff; just enhancing things, adding more smoke, making shots feel windier.”

The trailer park sequence is a highly climactic beat of the film, as the school bus becomes trapped in a smoke-filled labyrinth while looking for a way out of the path of the wildfires.

“We had an idea of the direction the bus was travelling in and where it would be travelling, and then in between it was all about Kevin driving into these dead ends and the dead ends were large fires, basically,” explains McLaren.

“So he'd run into these walls of fire and then have to get out of there and change direction. We had an idea of how that should go from a lot of references Charlie [Noble] gave us. We also had a load of set scans that helped with the direction the bus was travelling in.

“In conjunction with that, the bus does leave the set at one point which was a Director decision, so then we got into a world where we're no longer on set and we're in an empty car park."

"This became challenging because we found we were filling more in with visual effects, adding more smoke, adding more environment which in some cases worked in our favour because it gave us an empty canvas to start putting in trailers and other elements.

“Doing this meant we were able to light all of those CG additions with our fires and in some ways some of those shots were more successful than the ones when we were confined to the set.”

The Lost Bus marks the fourth time Outpost VFX has worked with Director Paul Greengrass, following Jason Bourne, 22 July and News of the World. His trademark style involves more handheld camera work than most Directors employ, with an ambition to always keep the audience at the centre of the action. These kinds of camera moves can prove tricky in VFX, but as McLaren highlights, this wasn’t the case for The Lost Bus.

“Already that makes your matchmove a lot easier. We had a wealth of camera information from set so that all helped. The motion blur from the moving camera in relation to what was going on with the embers was more of a consideration – you've got motion blur from the embers moving and then you’ve got motion blur from the camera moving as well.

So it was finding a balance in between, so that the embers still registered. That would probably be one challenge – finding that that sweet spot where things aren't getting so blurred out because of the camera movement that they're not visible.”

Working with Charlie Noble and Gavin Round on the client side proved to be rewarding for the team, as McLaren concludes:

“Charlie had to handle so many shots and a had huge amount of responsibility to give feedback on so many things per day. We found his feedback and his direction to be very concise. I don't know if it's right to say he didn't overcomplicate things because that doesn't do him justice for what's been done and the complexity of some of the shots.

“I can’t say enough good stuff about working with them both. It wasn't just about making these gorgeous effects – it felt like they were both truly invested in the story.”