Breaking Down Shang-Chi's Massive Bus Fight With Luma Pictures (Exclusive)

From the moment the first teaser was released for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Marvel Studios teased the film's high-flying action. In fact, one of the biggest action pieces of the whole film takes place on a runaway transit bus in a sequence that'd make Speed blush. The moment was so big, it was one of the most-seen scenes throughout the film's entire marketing cycle. The visual effects team behind the moment was made up of dozens of VFX artists from Luma Pictures, some of whom we recently caught up with the break the massive moment down.

While certain shots in the film were entirely computer-generated — see our recent piece on the creation of Macau here — others were a mix of synthetic and natural shots. Shang-Chi star SImu Liu and his stunt doubles were oftentimes able to do fighting stunts on a real bus on-set in Sydney, but Luma still had to create a CG environment to place that bus in.

"Anytime that you saw some of the actors or the Shang-Chi is actually jumping off the bus, and you go from the inside the bus to outside the bus — those are the shots that the environment had to be fully recreated in building 3D," Luma VFX SUpervisor Alex Cancado tells us. "And then the bus was either a hybrid between using parts of the green screen with CG or full CG bus."

Does that mean all of the cars destroyed during the scene were fake? Not entirely. The production did manage to crash and wreck some autos for the ultimate effect.

"They created a very nice rig where the bus actually goes on top of the cars and starts smashing on them. It goes a whole block destroying pretty much every car parked in that area and that was all shot," Cancado adds. "We enhanced a few things. We of course added and cleaned up a couple of things here and there for the rig, and other things. But it was pretty well done for visual effects. It was something that gave us a lot of really great footage to use."

Coupled with a runaway bus barreling down a San Franciscan street is the fact Shang-Chi (Liu) is fighting half a dozen martial artists within the bus itself. One of these baddies includes Florian Munteanu's Razor Fist, a niche character from deep within the Marvel Comics stable of characters. The team at Luma also helped craft Razor Fist's look, including his red-hot blade hand.

"But at the end of the day, it was just too much, so we just kept pairing back, and pairing back, and pairing back," VFX supervisor Andrew Zink says. "And in all honesty, we just leaned on reference photography of blacksmithing, and sword making, of whenever you do get metals extremely hot, what does the heat look like? How does it dissipate through it? How does it photograph?"

He adds, "So we kind of just leaned into things that were just true to the real world. And then that's kind of how the blade looked to have come to life."

"What are the origins of Razor Fist? Who is he as a character? What makes him special? What gives him his powers? And we start going down that route," Zink concludes. "But one of the things that was relatively new was the energy to the blade. As far as I know, that was never something that was established in the comics. So that was something that we had to just create on our own. And hopefully it's legacy that can continue on with the universe."

Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and produced by Kevin Feige and Jonathan Schwartz, with Louis D'Esposito, Victoria Alonso, and Charles Newirth serving as executive producers. David Callaham & Destin Daniel Cretton & Andrew Lanham wrote the screenplay for the film, which is now in theaters. The film is due out on home media release beginning November 12th.

What did you think of Shang-Chi's MCU debut? Let us know your thoughts either in the comments section or by hitting our writer @AdamBarnhardt up on Twitter to chat all things MCU!