How would you do a car shot with dialog and drive-off into the sunset?

[Stephen Pruitt]

Here's my idea:

Travel car shot, usual left-right camera angles. Actor delivers a closing zinger, smiles, and turns and looks out the side window as the car speeds off into the distant sunset without a break in the shot.

It seems to me that to do this seamlessly, I'd have to mount the camera on some sort of a jib mounted to another car driving next to the subject car. But it seems to me that I'd have all sorts of vibration issues with a camera on a jib getting slammed by the wind at speed, to say nothing of the issues of perfect vehicle speed sync so that the shot doesn't drift around.

Obviously, I've never done anything like this before.

Any thoughts?

Stephen

 

[Sarah C.]

greenscreen.

 

[Rodney Johnson]

Muppet's Take Manhattan has a shot of one of the characters in a bus singing, slowly the bus pulls away the camera is left on the side of the road as the bus drives away. You can't see the background moving through the bus window. It looks like they just staged it with a still camera on the side of the road adding a little vibration at the beginning of the shot. It's kind of hard to describe... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=penzsVANV0k The shot I'm thinking of is at about 1:35

 

[Liam Hall]

Crane mounted on a camera tracking vehicle with air suspension.

 

[Milan Spasic]

You need an Ultimate Arm™ or similar rig to execute the shot.
Shooting a tire commercial with this rig next week:

 

[Stephen Pruitt]

Wow, Milan. . . that is quite a rig! I think I'm going to have to come up with an alternative shot.

Alas. . . that's often the way it is with low budget cinema.

:-(

Thanks for the suggestions.

Stephen

 

[Milan Spasic]

Stephen,

If you have an access to a steady cam, you may be able pull this shot of off the back of a truck.

If not, a good driver, smooth road and hand held is always a DIY option. Good luck.

 

[Craig Ryan]

The thing with that Muppet shot, is that there's no evidence the bus is actually moving (at least on this highly compressed youtube clip) up until it moves forward out of frame. My guess is that it didn't actually drive until it was supposed to move off frame, and the magic of sound took care of the rest. Then again, looking at it closer, you could argue that the fur on the character is blown back by wind, but who knows.

I think you can have a lot of fun with a shot like this. If its real low budget, get a couple cars and have a go. Try it a few different ways (as suggested above) and see which is the most effective.

 

[Kim Frank]

You will definetly get very good results with a pickup truck or Van if the road is smooth and you're not going too fast. Try to use a wider lense to create the illusion of speed. For the shot you're describing you would need to shoot to the side and out of the front. Therefor you would want to get the Windshield out of the way.
Take a look at this: Citroen 2CV Its from a moviecar rental in Germany and you get it for 350,-€ a day. It has a very soft suspension and several bazooka mounts. But in another vehicle you could just use a heavy Bazooka base plate to get the same stability.

 

[Stephen Pruitt]

We're going to try it all out as soon as we can get some snow off the roads. There's no chance of getting a smooth shot over ice-covered roads!

My current thinking is that I am going to bolt a big steel plate onto our grip truck's life gate. That plate will stick out about 4 feet to the side of the truck. I'll then mount some sort of a shock-absorbing column onto the plate and mount my tripod head onto that. On a smooth enough road, I think it just might work. I guess we'll find out.

If, by chance, I never post anything on REDUser in the future, you'll know that I either fell off the grip truck and/or got hit by a passing car.



Stephen

 

[Chris Forbes]

You could put the car on a flatbed semi truck. Shoot as your rolling down the road. Then when you want the car to leave frame just dolly down the trailer.

 

[Mark Collins]

For something like this I would use a combo of an excellent cameraman with a camera mounted in the back of a pickup truck that's being driven by the very best driver I could find, and then probably let the driver do most of the work with moving the camera around the front of the car and to the side.

 

[Tim Sutherland]

There are shotmaker trucks with arms on them that would work really well for this type of shot.

Tim

 

[peteb]

I think you could just do as others have said and shoot it with a car/truck driving next to the point of interest. Any wobble you could take out in post using motion tracking software like Boujou or matchmover.

 

[Tyler Black]

If you want to allow the picture car to drive off and follow it as it recedes into the sunset, I don't think you can shoot it out of an ordinary vehicle. You'll have to have the camera at window height to get a good shot of the talent, and as they pull away and you follow, you'll end up with a shot of the back of the cab of whatever vehicle the camera is on. Somehow you have to get the camera out in front of the camera car for an unobstructed view of the picture car speeding away. I'm not a grip and don't know how safe it is to mount a speedrail rig to the front of a truck, but if you had a hot head, you might even be able to operate the camera from inside the truck.

I personally think the Muppets solution to the problem was pretty cleaver. Get the camera low enough so all you see is sky behind the talent and shake the camera a little bit... viola... you're moving down the road.

As an aside - don't forget to tape your focus and iris rings if you're shooting outside a moving vehicle so they don't drift in the high wind... unless you've got control of them remotely, of course.

 

[Jackson Yeung]

Steadicam hard-mounted to mini-van / pick-up truck?

 

[Nelson Goforth]

Precision Driver

Precision Driver

The most important element is a precision driver, both for picture and for safety. Even if you can't afford a real insert car, spend the money on a stuntman or an experienced driver for the camera vehicle.

I'd think that a pickup truck would be a better camera car than a grip truck, but I guess you go with what you have.

Hopefully the talent is smart enough to let the camera car driver do the work and not freak out. This is one of the reasons that SAG dictates that actors don't act and drive.

Nelson