Paul Walker’s tragic demise nearly two years ago didn’t allow him to complete his final performance in Fast 7. This gave director James Wan the difficult task of figuring out how best to finish the movie without Walker.
The decision was made to enlist the aid of Weta Digital (owned by director Peter Jackson), a company with a lot of experience in movie CGI. Representatives did apparently state from the start that it would be an almost impossible task to fool the audience into not seeing what was digitized.
Joe Letteri, a senior VFX supervisor at Weta Digital, explained to Variety they “had to complete a performance — what Paul Walker would have done if he’d been able to continue.”
They do say they did a great job, using 350 different shots of the actor, body scans of his two brothers as well as another actor that had the same build as Walker.
The trickier shots to make weren’t the ones where Walker was doing something action-movie-like, as those are shot much wider. Where the CGI crew really had to painstakingly work to add him in were the ‘emotional’, quiet moments and generally just static shots focusing on his face or body.
They even mixed and blended images of Walker from the footage he did get to shoot for Fast 7. Some are from even older movies in the series.
Technology-wise, what was done to get the movie finished is at the cutting edge of CGI. Nobody could have pulled it of five years ago, according to Joe Letteri who said “no. It was barely possible last year when we did it.”