Paul Walker passed away in a car accident during the filming of the movie in 2013. But the film was incredibly finished thanks to the huge contribution of CGI technology. In order to finish the film, more than 200 shots were completed by Walker’s brothers, Caleb and Cody. Their faces were replaced by CGI versions of Walker during post-production.

In the beginning, Paul Walker’s brother’s face was used to be scanned for the reference, but it didn’t work well. The team had to find archived photos and footage of Walker’s from the previous film as reference. And then they tried to craft Walker’s CGI face, but at the same time, they also needed to prevent the effect of uncanny valley. The team spent a lot of time on the CG model of his hair, skin, coloring, and even facial movements. They use Walker’s brothers’ acting as body doubles and place the CGI face of Walker on top of his brothers. The sound editors used audio recordings of Walker from existing dialogue previously recorded by Walker to reconstruct certain scenes, and just digitally cutting and pasting it into the new film. The final result wasn’t flawless but it was very impressive. It took the team tons of money and time to recreate Paul Walker’s face to complete the film.

The same technique has been used in other films too. Such as, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum, ‘The Planet of Apes’ Caesar, and ‘Avatar’. This technology has been applied to more and more films today, many action stars already start to scan their bodies to build some more trickier visual effects.

It is hard to imagine how the team of Fast and Furious 7 experienced and handled all the obstacles caused by Walker’s tragic passing. But they did a really good job on the CG faces to make it look realistic and vivid.