Fuze Studios were producing the AMR25 launch film for Aston Martin F1 Team and needed environments that felt rooted in engineering reality - while depicting forces no physical facility could generate. AVA Studio was brought in to build those environments from scratch, along with the custom mechanical rigs that would fill them.
The brief
Stress-testing at the edge of physics
The creative idea was straightforward and extreme: what would it look like to subject an F1 car to forces far beyond anything it encounters on a circuit? Not a conventional testing facility - a brutalist, monumental space where the machines doing the testing are as dramatic as the car itself.
The architecture needed to sit at an unusual intersection: clearly brutalist and physically credible, but architecturally impossible. Something that reads as a real place someone works in - and simultaneously as something that couldn't exist.
What we built
Three testing environments
Each space was modelled, lit and rigged as an operational set - not a backdrop. Here is how the three came together.
01
The Wind Chamber
A monumental brutalist hall housing a wind tunnel that generates forces no standard vehicle could survive. The air movement reads as something physical and overwhelming - not just atmospheric, but structurally threatening.
02
The Suspension Platform
A testing rig that subjects the chassis to vibration and load cycles far beyond any real circuit. Custom high-poly models, physics simulation, and IK rig systems - all controllable by the director in real time inside Unreal Engine.
03
The Tensile Room
The car suspended by cables, hydraulic arms pulling outward in multiple axes simultaneously. The most abstract of the three spaces - reading as part laboratory, part something more primal and architectural.
Technical approach
Custom rigs,
real-time control
Each testing mechanism wasn't a static model - it was a fully operational rigged system. We built custom IK setups and physics simulations for every machine, all running inside Unreal Engine. The director could adjust, animate, and explore in real time without hitting a technical ceiling.
There was no existing pipeline for this kind of setup. We developed our own tooling and workflows from scratch, because the brief required solutions that simply hadn't been built before.
Everything - environments, mechanisms, materials - was optimised for real-time rendering. The result: photorealistic output that went directly to the director without a separate rendering queue.
Making it feel inhabited
The details
that matter
Brutalist architecture at monumental scale tends to read as sterile. We worked against that. Every surface carries evidence of use: worn edges on wall corners, barely-visible fingerprints on glass doors and handrails, the specific kind of scuffing that accumulates in a working facility over time.
We also referenced real interior photography from the Aston Martin F1 Team facility, incorporating actual architectural details from their offices into the fictional space. The environments are impossible — but they contain something that is genuinely theirs.
ASTON MARTIN F1 TEAM AMR25 LAUNCH FILM - ENVIRONMENTS & RIGS BY AVA STUDIO AND SNEZHANA.NYC CG STUDIO · DIRECTION, EDIT & POST BY FUZE STUDIOS
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