How they made the skyview restaurant disaster in Final Destination Bloodlines

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Zach Lipovsky and Adam B Stein presented an impressive and engaging pitch to secure the directing role in Final Destination 6 (Final Destination Bloodlines). A memorable Zoom meeting saw them pull off a humorous stunt involving a fire and a ceiling fan, which seemed to decapitate Stein. Successfully landing the job, they filmed the movie from March 4th to May 6th, 2024, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada for 45 days, with an additional 14 days of second-unit filming. The film opens with a remarkable scene featuring the skyview restaurant disaster.

The movie starts in 1969 as Iris and Paul, a young couple, attend the grand unveiling of the magnificent Skyview Restaurant, perched atop a 500-foot steel tower. This colossal Skyview serves as the backdrop for the film’s initial foreshadowing of impending doom. Over the course of twenty days (with thirteen on the main set and seven on the secondary set), scenes depicting the calamities that strike the restaurant’s guests were filmed across nine separate sets.

The remarkable and advanced 1969 Skyview Restaurant was constructed to mirror a pinball machine in design. Designed by Rachel O’Toole, it features circular and curved elements, lights resembling pinballs, and seating and benches that behave like bumpers when things get hectic. The Skyview’s appearance draws heavily from the renowned 1960s Trans World Airlines Flight Center at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, created by esteemed Mid-Century architect Eero Saarinen. The Skyview exudes elegance and modernity, flowing seamlessly… until the pandemonium begins. At this point, the furniture moves and aligns along S-curves, and when the restaurant tilts, the patrons slide and collide like pinballs… until they exit the machine.

The Skyview set utilizes LED wall technology with volume, which means a series of LED screens showcase video or 3D content as backdrops, while real-life filming occurs in the foreground. Unlike smaller practical sets used on other volume sets, the Skyview restaurant set was an impressive build, stretching out to a massive 80 feet in diameter. As stated by Adam B. Stein, “I believe it’s one of the largest sets ever constructed within a volume.

At the Skyview restaurant, a catastrophic incident occurred featuring an expansive, panoramic viewing area boasting a 360-degree perspective, thanks to an LED virtual volume wall. Visual effects supervisor Nordin Rahhali likened the volume to “an enormous, seamless, edgeless LED TV, made up of countless smaller TVs stacked together like Lego blocks, forming a towering wall that becomes significantly larger than a single TV. The entire structure serves as one gigantic screen. Our setup was semi-circular, encircling the dining area. It stood about 30 feet high and had a circumference of approximately 80 feet in diameter. Powered by a bank of servers and computers running Unreal Engine, a video game engine, this setup displayed content in real time. The wall’s unique attribute is its ability to create content with a perspective that matches the moving cameras within it, allowing for a dynamic background that includes moving objects such as birds, planes, rippling water, and changing building perspectives as the camera moves in real-time. This technology is truly groundbreaking.

For the Skyview, Pixomondo tailored a specialized environment and utilized it as a virtual production studio. Additionally, they were among the visual effects companies responsible for post-production work on some of the houses.

The production incorporated advanced on-set techniques along with a nostalgic traditional effect, playfully referred to as the “Star Trek” method. To capture a segment of Iris’ prophetic vision where the Skyview floor seems to fracture, the actors mimicked the illusion of tilting floors, moved furniture to make it appear as if it was sliding, adjusted the camera angle, and synced the display on the wall with the footage, creating an impression that the building was quivering. Similarly, in the original Star Trek series, when the Enterprise sustained damage and the actors on the bridge simulated the effect, this method was employed to make the Skyview appear as if it was also shaking.

At the Skyview Restaurant incident, scenes were staged and recorded using nine distinct sets. One of these sets was designed with a section slanted at a 30-degree angle. Due to this incline, all crew members working on that set had to be securely fastened or they would have slid towards the windows below.

During particularly demanding shooting sessions, the scene featured a large cast consisting of over 150 actors, stunt performers, and extras. On certain days, the makeup team led by Christopher Pinhey, the hair department headed by Julie McHaffie, and the costume designer Michelle Hunter, along with their respective crews, totaled more than 60 members.

How they made the skyview restaurant disaster in Final Destination Bloodlines!

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2025-05-22 02:24