Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson sums up his role in helping to make George Miller’s follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road as “a constantly evolving three-dimensional puzzle.”

“George would storyboard and previs a scene and then would go out into the real world and film trucks and motorbikes driving around in a landscape or in set pieces,” says Jackson. “Then in VFX we have to design one world and try and shoehorn all these little bits of live-action into that one world so that everything makes sense when you cut from one shot of the car driving around, then go to a wide, but, where is that in the wide, it can’t be too far advanced–all those things. It really is a puzzle to design a world that can incorporate all of those pieces of live-action without any of them breaking or feeling like they’re in the wrong place.”

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Like Fury Road, on which Jackson was also visual effects supervisor, Furiosa contains no shortage of effects-filled vehicle chases and raids. These moments began as sketches and storyboards that evolved into detailed previs crafted by PROXi Virtual Production, an outfit from Harrison and Guy Norris (who is also the film’s action designer and second unit director).

Another side of the VFX work, too, was the translation of Anya Taylor-Joy’s facial features onto the younger Furiosa actor, Alyla Browne, a task accomplished with machine learning techniques by Rising Sun Pictures. Metaphysic also crafted a synthetic character–The Bullet Farmer–with its machine learning tools.

In this befores & afters coverage of Furiosa, we break down a number of key VFX moments and characters in the film–the stowaway sequence, the attack at the Bullet Farm, scenes at Gastown, the attempted rescue of young Furiosa, the pursuit of Dementus, and the creation of young Furiosa and The Bullet Farmer. combination of live-action stunts and special effects in western New South Wales, Australia and at locations closer to Sydney (visual effects supervisor Paul Butterworth was on set for this filming). A team of postvis artists then pieced shot elements and temporary CG ones together for several months while editorial began, and as a significant digital visual effects effort also ramped up, with DNEG as the main vendor and Framestore also handling a number of wasteland sequences.