as i was Previous article, I recently completed production on a feature film and will continue to document our process on my blog. In today’s segment, I’m going to focus on one of the biggest challenges we faced during production – the moving car scene.
Shooting a conversation scene inside a moving vehicle is never easy, and it’s especially difficult when your budget is tight (or non-existent). On a full-scale feature film with a larger budget, you could block roads, use rigging to mount the camera to the hood of a car, use process trailers to let the actors focus on acting (rather than driving), or shoot everything on a soundstage Keep things simple.
Micro-budget productions, on the other hand, cannot afford any of these luxuries, so other techniques are needed to film without sacrificing quality or safety.
It can be very difficult to operate a handheld camera in a moving vehicle, let alone pull focus, change camera settings, swap filters, or make any other adjustments on the fly. You certainly can’t shoot from inside the car (and mount the camera on the hood). However, this is usually a bad idea if not allowed, as it draws a lot of attention and can cause safety issues for the actors as they need to drive with an obstructed view of the road.
Not to mention, the sound itself presents its own set of challenges… Even with carefully installed microphones in the car, a moving car always sounds like a moving car. While some post-audio work may be able to minimize engine sounds, rumble, and other road noise, the end result will never be perfect.
Add to that the difficulty of directing actors in a car scene (if you’re not operating your own camera), and you run into a host of other problems. For these reasons and more, many micro-budget productions have no choice but to use some out-of-the-box techniques or “hacks” to solve these problems.
One of the most common solutions is to shoot on a green screen, which works well, although I didn’t consider this option for this project. This method simply places a green screen behind any window inside the car and replaces it with a backdrop of moving road footage.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of green screen shots – not because they don’t look great (of course they can), but generally because these types of VFX shots don’t usually fit the aesthetic I want. I gravitate toward real, organic, natural shots, and I can always tell when a car scene is shot with a green screen, even on a large production. With that in mind, I knew right away that green-screened driving shots wouldn’t be an option for this particular movie.
At the same time, I knew I urgently needed to figure out a few things, as this feature was of the “road movie” genre, which meant a lot of driving scenes needed to be captured throughout the production. Before we started shooting, I actually redesigned some of the scenes that were originally going to take place in the van so that they could be set in different environments (rest stops, hotels, etc.). This takes some of the pressure off while also diversifying the look of the movie…but that doesn’t take away from the fact that there are still a ton of dialogue scenes that need to be worked through quickly.
The first option I considered was mounting the camera inside the van. We rented an old VW campervan for the shoot, which had quite a bit of space inside, so the camera could theoretically be mounted in a window, floor or roof.
Here’s a screenshot from the movie, showing the truck in the distance:
Side note: If you have never shot in a car before, you should know that if your camera is securely mounted/fixed to the body of the car, you will get very stable footage. Even if the car is driving on a bumpy road, your camera will move in sync with the car and capture perfectly stable footage because it won’t float around your handheld device or bounce up and down on a rocky tripod. Many filmmakers don’t realize this and think that shooting handheld will actually help the camera absorb the bumps, but it actually makes the bumps worse.
In our case, it made sense to equip the car from a practical standpoint, but the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to continue with the project. While it’s relatively cheap and easy to buy some suction mounts and mount the camera in them, it’s not the look I was going for. The film was mostly shot handheld, with only a few specific scenes shot on a tripod to evoke different emotions. Using the rig inside the van certainly allowed us to capture steady footage, but the look wasn’t suitable for these scenes. For this reason (and some safety concerns I had about the rigging options), the idea of mounting the camera inside the van was dismissed early on.
Another option is to simply shoot handheld from the back seat (and accept the bumps), but this is really difficult to execute, the sound will be greatly affected, and safety concerns remain.
So at this point I knew there was only one option – a poor man’s process trailer. What I mean by “process trailer” is the camera looking through the front windshield while the truck is parked.
By shooting directly through the front windshield (using a polarizer to eliminate reflections) and having one of our crew members rock the van from side to side, we were able to capture several driving scenes without doing any actual driving. This solves a lot of problems. It allows actors to work freely (and safely) without having to worry about driving on the road, it greatly improves the quality of our images and sound, and it gives us a unique perspective through the windshield that is not otherwise available possible.
We were lucky that the van we rented had a curtain on the back windshield, so even though we were filming from the front, you couldn’t see what was behind the van…so there was nothing to give away the fact that the van wasn’t actually moving. In some cases we have to be careful with reflections on the front windshield, as their lack of movement will of course give away the fact that we are not driving. To fix this, we just relied on polarizers to eliminate glare and parked the van somewhere where there wouldn’t be too many reflections.
For night shots, this is easier to achieve since the background will turn black. This means our lens size can be wider and we can look out the side windows without giving away the fact that we’re not moving.
If the night scene takes place in a city, we’ll need some LED panels or other lighting on the sides (and back) of the van to simulate the appearance of traffic lights and other cars on the road. But in this case, the character is supposed to be driving along a dark desert road, so we don’t need to add any additional lighting.
Night scenes are mostly taken during the blue hour (after sunset). This gave the actors’ faces a really nice, natural light that seemed to have an organic coolness. Of course, this also meant that we had to shoot these scenes very quickly – but with enough rehearsal time beforehand, this wasn’t a problem at all.
So, all in all, we were able to capture some really nice driving footage without having to do too much real driving… while leaving more room to work with the actors, experiment with framing, improve our audio quality, etc.
We also shot some car scenes through the windows where the cars would have been parked, so that the look would be consistent:
Of course, we did need to get some real driving shots from inside the van so they could be interspersed with dialogue shot through the windows. But being able to rely more on footage shot through the window meant we could simply shoot behind-the-scenes footage from the back seat and film the actors driving down the road, just like we would if we weren’t filming at all.
Ultimately, choosing to work this way greatly enhanced our driving scenarios. If we risked filming all of these scenes in the car while actually driving, quality would take a major hit in every aspect.
That’s it for now! I’ll be sure to share some edited material from these scenes and tons of other content over the next few weeks, so stay tuned…
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