Brazil’s Miagui studio launched itself in the international VFX market with its work in Netflix’s original series Senna. The studio provided VFX for two important episodes in the miniseries, which was launched on the platform on 29 November.
The synopsis of the series reads: Senna is a six part drama series based on the life of Ayrton Senna da Silva, the Brazilian racing legend who won the Formula 1 World Drivers’ Championship three times. He died in a racing accident 30 years ago.
The project is led by directors Cássio Braga and Carlos Kulpa. The company accepted the challenge of recreating some of the legendary racing scenes from the 1984 and 1988 Monaco GPs, entirely in CGI. Miagui team worked on this project for one whole year with a team of around 60 Brazilian artists from several departments.
The VFX team decided to recreate the streets of Monaco in CGI, allowing them to have creative freedom, but without sacrificing the historic accuracy. Based on a detailed study of visual references from the period, the studio digitally reconstructed in detail more than 120 buildings surrounding the circuit, as well as hundreds of elements faithful to the period, creating shots never seen before by Formula 1 and Senna’s fans.
The studio digitally developed and created Formula 1 cars, as well as their respective drivers, in computer graphics down to the smallest detail, based on photographic references and scans made from the prototypes used on the racing track. To animate the racing scenes, it was necessary to study the choreography of the cars, overtakings, points of view on the track, details of the curves and even the accidents, to later digitally recreate each key moment of the story experienced by the drivers.
“For Miagui, the opportunity to collaborate with Senna is a dream that has been in the making for a decade and a half. From the beginning, we knew it would be a huge challenge, but also an opportunity to use all of our creative and technical capabilities to help build a much bigger story,” said Miagui’s CEO Braga.
One of the main protagonists of the historic 1984 race was the rain, an element that further increased the technical challenge of producing Senna. According to Kulpa, one of the biggest challenges that they faced was of creating realistic simulations, like being able to break down the complexity of natural events into parts so that they can reconstruct each of these parts in a controlled manner and later be added together in an integrated way, resulting in a visually interesting, but above all, convincing, aspect.
The studio was one of the main vendors of the series alongside Scanline. The miniseries is directed by Vicente Amorim and Júlia Rezende and produced by Gullane. Actor Gabriel Leone plays the role of Senna in the series. Pâmela Tomé plays Senna’s TV star girlfriend, Xuxa, Matt Mella as French driver Alain Prost and Patrick Kennedy as McLaren team principal Ron Dennis.
The studio’s expertise in automotive CGI was one of the key factors in its decision to accept the task. For more than 15 years, it has developed projects for global brands such as Honda, Ford, Jeep, Hyundai and Toyota, not only in Brazil, but also in markets such as Europe, the UAE, the USA and South Korea. The company also creates animation and VFX for clients such as Whirlpool (Brastemp and Consul), Havaianas, Paramount+, Manscaped and Heineken, among others.
