Essential Gear for Cinematic Car Scenes on a Budget

I don't know about you but earlier on in my career as a documentary cinematographer I was never really sure how to film cinematic car scenes I mean I'd seen Hollywood setups with tow trucks and crazy speed rail rigs but that didn't really translate into what I was experiencing while shooting documentaries with small teams but over the years I've picked up a ton of tips techniques and gear hacks from high-end industry DPS who showed me how to get great results using a variety of different camera types all the way from GoPros up to full Cinema Rigs and luckily if you know what you're doing getting high-end results is very achievable even if you're just a solo operator because even if you don't shoot scenes like this every day knowing exactly what to do when your story calls for something out of the ordinary is what separates average cinematographers from great ones and just one quick thing to mention before we dive right into it this video is actually lifted directly from my documentary cinematography course which is open for about another week or so before the door shut again for 6 months so if you love getting deep into this kind of thing then I made this course for you this video is just one of another 15 brand new long form lessons that I added for the second intake of this course bringing the total to over 75 videos with more than 12 hours of in-depth cinematography talk most of these new videos are Hands-On practical ones just like this because that's what the first cohort said they wanted and so I listened it's not just about car rigs though because we go into all aspects of the job from Advanced lighting tutorials to gear choices to professional development to more specialized shooting scenarios like this one honestly I don't think there's anything else quite like it out there for people who are looking to take their documentary cinematography seriously this year and I'm really proud of how it's turned out so enjoy this free lesson from the course and hopefully I'll see some of you in the members group soon this video is all about cars more specifically we're going to be talking about how to shoot exteriors of cars while they're actually driving now you might be asking yourself why I picked one of the windiest and coldest days of the year so far in Toronto to film this video and that would be a valid question and the answer is because if I'm going to recommend any techniques or products out there I want to make sure they actually work so it's my camera out there on the hood instead of yours for now let's start rigging so if you're thinking about filming the outsides of cars or car exteriors the first thing that might come to mind is a GoPro and I have a LoveHate relationship with GoPros but uh sometimes they are the only and best camera for the job now when it comes to GoPros there's a few basic things that I think are more or less mandatory if you want to make these things look decent so just very quickly before I start framing up I'm going to go into my basic GoPro settings and I'm going to shoot 4K that part isn't necessarily connected to the image quality but I want to give myself options to crop in later and post so I'll shoot 4K for this video but the things that are really going to make a difference are your lens choices I like to use linear lenses at the widest sometimes I'll even do the narrow even though that's just a digital punching I hate that fish will affect the gopro's look and I think it sort of cheapens the overall look of your project so after that I want to make sure the bit rate is turned to high the white balance is proper so we're shooting outside so we'll do 15 5500 I want to turn the sharpness to low because it's a lot easier to add sharpness in post than it is to try and make a GoPro file look unsharp and then I want to change the colors away from GoPro colors to flat um it's not like a true log file or anything I heard the the very new GoPros are a little bit better at this but um it just makes it a little bit easier to grade and gives you a bit more latitude to match it to your other footage cuz that's really the challenge you want it to look the same as your other footage um hyper smooth and all that we won't get into generally turn on whatever kind of stabilization you have for a car it'll remove those micro Jitters now you might have noticed that I skipped over one setting which I think is maybe the most important one if it's if your goal is to make GoPro footage look more you know air quote cinematic and that's the shutter so with GoPros if you leave the shutter on auto it's going to internally increase the shutter to compensate for all the light coming in cuz usually they're shooting outside and that's going to make your footage look really sort of unnaturally sharp sort of like the difference between a soap opera and a movie I personally don't like that look maybe you're going for it I hate it uh so the best way to make GoPro footage look a little better and match everything else that's coming out of my fx3 and my fx9 is to use a manual shutter speed so I want to make sure that my shutter is at 1 over 48 which should give it a much better look when used with a 24 frames a second frame rate just like you'd set with a camera 24 you double the you double the shutter speed you get 48 that should be a big difference and that's all well and good but the issue is then is that your GoPro is most likely going to be very exposed cuz you've basically taken away all of its Auto exposure tools and that means that the only way to make this work is with additional accessories you need filters so basically to get these off if you didn't know you can twist the the front filter and then it comes off and you get this sort of little naked GoPro and then using third party ND filters So today we're lucky that it is not very bright if you're shooting in a really sunny location then you need a lot of ND you know even nd8 might do it before I screw this thing on I'm just going to hold it up I mean that's looking pretty good we've already gone from completely blown highlights to it looking pretty good so I still say use them as a last resort I don't like the way they look but it makes me hate them just a touch less The Next Step I'm going to get outside and try and find my frame and then we'll get the mounting Hardware out okay we're going full hood on now it is way below freezing right now it is really chilly even if it doesn't look like it on camera so I've got cleaning stuff and mounting hardware here uh but the first thing I would do is probably just look through the camera's viewfinder so a shot I love in a perspective you don't see that much is looking back at the driver from the front hood I kind of like to do a shot where you can see the driver plus a bit of the city off to the side I think it's kind of like a cool look at their emotional side it can read is really reflective while also showing you where your story is taking place and like I said there are no rules if you want to look at look from over here if you want to show a two shot of two characters at the same time you can do that as well um but for the sake of this we're just going to do this one shot cuz it's something I've done a few times before and I've always liked the way it looks now there's a couple problems we're going to have to deal with technically speaking uh the main one is probably reflection off the wind screen but I think we'll save the tutorial for how to sort of deal with that for when we get into mounting the bigger camera system so for right now I'm just going to clean off a section of the dashboard cuz we're going to use a suction cut Mount um and so whenever you're working with a suction system you want to make sure you're putting it on like a really clean surface otherwise it's just going to compromise the seal so I'm use these wet wipes and this uh cloth to clean off the area and then we'll get the suction cup mount out and Frame It Up [Music] one thing GoPro does really well is they've got lots of ways to mount these things uh I won't go through them all you already know what they are uh I actually have this weird little suction cup to pin to tripod to GoPro Mount thing that I've had for years and years and years now that works really well GoPro makes their own suction cup as well uh but I'm going to use this one now the nice thing about this is that you can really you know dial in the exact positioning the GoPro one is a little bit more limited in its functionality but um it does work if you do go with a magic Arm System like this uh it's generally a better idea to keep it sort of to keep the arm sort of a little tighter rather than fully extending it it just reduces the vibrations but I would go for either but if you have the option keeping things a little more compact reduces the micro Jitters even [Music] more all right so that's kind of a neat angle we're doing this relatively quickly just for demonstration purposes but I mean I think that's an unusual perspective that you don't see that often and for a sort of reflective driving scene to put into your story uh this could play really well so now I'm going to roll this camera and then I'm going to get in the car and drive around a little bit and we can see what it looks like and then I'll compare it with what it looks like without the ND filter so you can see for yourself if you think it's makes a big enough difference I personally think it does but you can decide for yourself so we'll roll this and then go for a little tour around the [Music] block [Music] so we're driving now on the weekend when traffic is light and we're in an out of the way sort of part of the city but one thing that if you're doing this for yourself you should always put a safety leash um connecting the camera to the car just in case your suction seal breaks I didn't do that this time because of this situation but when we we get the bigger camera out you're going to see that I put a lot of emphasis into securing it properly so make sure it's not going to fall off into traffic on the highway and cause a bunch of problems okay so I'm just going to pop that out and have a look at the footage and see what we got okay I'm just looking at the footage and the angle is okay you know it's fine we could Tinker with it and make it better but uh it is a cool perspective and I'm really liking the way the motion blur looks a lot more organic than when you let the shutter uh do its own thing on auto but the first thing I notice is that it's actually really hard to see me uh the character in this story and so the way you get around that is by using a polarizer polarizers reduce Reflections and all sorts of things from glass to water um and so luckily I also carry around uh these free well ND plus polarizers I like to carry both ND with and without polarization because when you're shooting into glass it's nice to have a polarizer but if I wanted to do a POV perspective from a car or something where there wasn't a reflection it can sometimes make the colors look a little wonky and oversaturated um so it's good to have both options but in this case we definitely need it so I'm going to swap out the straight ND for the ND with polarization and then we'll put it back on the mount and do another lap so you can see how that changes [Music] things so I'll try and get more or less the same frame and now if I just turn the polarizer you can see that I can almost kind of pick where the reflections fall so I'm going to create a nice clear field of view right through to the driver where I'll be sitting and then we'll roll this again all the [Music] beat glad to see that old Mount still works I've had that thing since I want to say 2017 and it's still going strong so buy nice or byy [Music] twice okay so we're back I'm just going to grab the GoPro back and see if that made the difference that I think and hope it will yeah so right away night and day difference uh um I can see my face clearly through the wind screen and there's some reflection still there I'm still keeping that nice uh motion background blur that organic feeling from the ND but we can see through the glass so definitely if you're planning to do a shot like this looking back make sure that you have a polarization option or the reflections are Moody they are like a cool feeling but if the idea is to see your character especially if there's some sort of dialogue or if you just need to see their face then a polarizer is sort of non-optional so now we're just going to do a quick control test just to compare the footage um to GoPro set to Auto so I'm not going to put all the settings back to the sort of default GoPro settings but I am going to put the shutter back on auto and I'm going to turn the sharpness back on and I'm going to change the color from Flat to GoPro um and it should make a pretty noticeable difference in the footage especially after we grade our uh 24 frames a second footage that's shot on flat so I'll put this on we'll do one more lap and then we'll see how they all look side by [Music] side okay so I just pulled the mounting that's the last the GoPro for today let me just have a look to me anyways you can call me a cinematography snob but to me there's a world of difference this whole background just does not feel organic it just looks overly crunchy and to me it looks like a GoPro you can make up your own mind maybe you think it doesn't matter but I care you can do obviously a lot more things than this like you can find a better angle you could get different kinds of GoPro mounts and hang them underneath the car that's one thing that's really cool about GoPros is you can kind of put them In Harm's Way a little more I'm not going to spend too much time on that because that's a whole video in itself but now I want to show you what you can do to get a bigger more sort of professional camera on the the front if you wanted to take this uh even a level higher in terms of quality so instead of using a GoPro we're going to get a Sony A7 on the front of the car and see what that looks [Music] like so it just started snowing right in time for us to do our biggest setup because GoPros are fine they're all well good but really we want to try and use nicer cameras if we can this is all about elevating the visuals to what we can realistically do in a documentary environment so the goal is going to try and be to use this a73 with this lawa uh Ranger fullframe cine lens these are really cool new lenses that I've just started to play with and they're very quickly becoming my favorite full frame oriented Cinema Zoom the only con of this thing is that it's very long long and heavy so you need a pretty Burly system to make a rig like this work luckily I have one so this is the I footage spider crab system I wouldn't say that this is the burliest uh car mount system you can get you know there's huge rigs made by companies like Matthews and stuff but this is really well made and it all fits into one case from my point of view as a documentary specialist this is sort of the most attainable but very professional car mouth system system that you can get this is much cheaper than a lot of options out there but the build quality is still insane and this system can hold up to like 66 lb somewhere around there of weight so you can put anything up to like a fullon Alexa Cinema rig on the front of a car if you wanted using this so for me this is probably about as premium as I would get for a system like this cuz at the end of the day they are kind of knee shots I'm not doing them all the time but it is nice to be able to do them well when you do have to do them so I'm just going to build up this rig quickly then I'll get it situated on the front of the car and and then we can see what it looks like so even though this is like a a budget option compared to some of the things out there this thing is built really really well I mean these arms and these locking Ros thats like it's really heavy duty and premium feeling and so I think this kit is actually multi- useful because these arms and the suction cups on their own are going to be super handy for mounting all sorts of things so the arms and the cups don't have to be attached to the center column um so I think I'm going to be able to find all sorts of uses for this outside of just uh mounting to cars so that's pretty [Music] cool okay so when you're done with it you're left with this kind of thing I mean you can definitely see why they decided to name it the spider crab it's a pretty perfect nickname so yeah we're going to bring this thing around to the front of the car and find some good Ang angles and then get it suctioned on and then Mount the camera okay so just like last time we want to make sure we're working with a a clean relatively dry area some moisture isn't bad because it can actually help the seal but you don't want it soaking wet so I'm just sort of wiping down where I'm going to put it and then we'll get our suction cups planted yeah that's going to be about right okay I'm going to lock these give it a bit of rigidity yeah that's really on there so now we can use the bow head this uh tripod head doesn't come with the kit you but you can also use any tripod head you you have I happen to have this one uh it's made by ey footage it's great um but you can use any ball head that you want as long as it has a 3/8 thread on the bottom so we've got it level now I'll throw the camera on here find the frame and we'll start driving around so we're going to use a Sony A7 uh a73 I might normally use my fx3 but we're filming on it right now so can't complain about this one though so we've got the ranger lens on which is really heavy but this can definitely handle that weight just make sure whatever system you're using that you're working within the rec recommended weight capacity cuz you do not want this falling off that would ruin your day very quickly so just like last time going to find the frame I've got a polarizing filter on the front of the lens so we can actually see our driver okay I'm going to start with a wide shot and then we'll try something a little tighter now obviously when you can start using uh mirrorless cameras and zoom lenses or prime lenses the quality is just going to go way up I'm going to try for a similar shot to last time um just to keep it consistent but as you can see you could easily put this anywhere like you could get a wide angle lens on the roof doing some really cool perspectives we could put it on the doors looking in the window we could put it on the doors looking down and low like this can go on any of the cars paneled and because of the way that the legs are all designed to move independently it can really grab on to a bunch of weird places in a way that most uh Car mounts can't so super cool okay so with the ey footage system we're lucky enough that the kit includes a dedicated um leash cup I guess you could call it which is just an extra one of the large heavyduty cups with a loop on it so I'm going to attach this string and Carabiner system um from this extra cup to the rig itself so that if one of these lets go and it falls this will catch it and stop it from falling and smashing everything and you can do an emergency stop stop and fix things if you don't have a fancy uh cup system like this that's okay you can make a safety rig in a lot of different ways just make sure you do one like if I didn't have this I would tie a a rope or a piece of paracord probably around uh a thick part of this rig and then run it to possibly a rear viw mirror shut it in the door um get inventive but make sure that you have some sort of safety [Music] I'll pull it tight but not too tight and yeah if one of these cups were to let go which I don't think they will but if it were to this would only fall 6 in and we'd be able to stop and grab the whole rig it might scratch the paint but you're not going to lose you know thousands of dollars worth of camera gear so I'll just tidy up the extra cable and then we'll go for a little Drive and see how it holds [Music] up okay let's do this so this looks kind of hilarious [Music] actually so yeah this is essentially the same shot that we did on the GoPro just on a much higher technical level so hopefully the footage looks a little bit better and since we're shooting in 4k I can already see it bouncing around a lot so this definitely wasn't the best lens choice I think we're going to have a look at this footage when we get back and realize that it's a little little jittery and uh I'll probably want to switch out the super Long Ranger Zoom for something like a 50 mm prime or a 24 mil prime or maybe a 16 to 35 something a little lighter and more compact all right so let's have a look at the footage I'm pretty sure it's too jittery but uh it was a fun test to see if something this big could be used and it can look great yeah looking back at the footage there's obviously a significant you know technical leap from using the GoPro um it looks really good to me I would say that yeah using a lens this long um is not the best choice we're going to switch it up and I'm going to put on something a lot more Compact and that's going to level out some of these Jitters here but I don't even hate the look of the Jitters it kind of to me feels um a little more gritty and immersive but it depends on what you're you're you're going for obviously the other thing is when using polarizers one of the reason that I prefer not to use polarizers if possible is that there's a pretty significant color shift now I'm not too worried this is mostly just a magenta shift and we're going to be able to take it out pretty easily in post but to be able to see through the glass does come at a little bit of a cost and it's a a color shift so let's change up the lenses and try something a little bit tighter because on a GoPro everything is super wide and one of the advantages of using a camera like this on a sturdy Mount is that you can use different lenses so I'm going to put a 50 mm Prime on and try and get uh a slightly more unusual angle and see how that goes okay so we've switched out the ranger Zoom with a Sigma 50 mm lens um and I think that's going to work a little bit better plus it's also going to be a tighter perspective which is just going to be very un GoPro which is something I like you know it's just going to be a little bit more cinematic sorry to use the word so we've got the 50 on there let's go for another drive and see how that [Music] [Music] looks okay so right away that looked a lot less jittery so I'm just going to grab the camera take a look at how it looked and then we'll think about a second angle yeah I mean that looks really cool to me that is a look that you don't often see um outside of sort of movie budgets and there's some Jitters and you're going to have to do a little bit of work and post to stabilize it but the perspective and the FOC range and the locked off movement it all just looks really interesting so if you're doing a story where there is a lot of driving involved and you really want to take it to the next level I mean this is going to make your footage look different from most other things out there the shorter lens was definitely the way to go though so if you have a choice try and pick something a little more Compact and probably the lighter the better um so I'm going to do one more test before we go I don't want this video to be by any means an exhaustive list of all the different angles you can choose to shoot on a car because it's kind of unlimited um but I want to try one more thing which is to put this whole rig on the roof of the car pointing forward so we get kind of a forward POV of driving I could see this being really neat um for showing the environment that your characters are pulling into like a dark Country Road or um a gritty Urban landscape you know I could think of a lot of ways to use this shot so I'm going to use probably a 16 to 35 maybe I'll try a 24 mil Prime but I think the 16 to35 just because of the internal stabilization and we'll see if we can make it happen so the first thing is to pull the safety leash obviously and then it should be as easy as popping all three of these seals and it comes off I mean it's kind of crazy that something so solid can come off so easily but very cool so now for this shot we're going to try and get it dead centered right in the middle of the car and uh don't judge me the roof of my car has not been washed in quite some [Music] time so I'm going to switch off the 50 Prime I think I'm going to go with the uh 16 to 35 just because there's built-in stabilization and I want to see what kind of a difference that makes um and the nice thing about now shooting away from the front of the car is that we don't have to use uh polarizers because we're not looking through the glass so we can just hopefully get a little bit better image quality than we were or not better image quality but less need for color correction and post because of the color shift so we'll get this up there and then do one final Loop and uh hopefully this is an interesting angle all right so we're going we've got the camera mounted on the top of the car we're definitely attracting a bunch of stairs from people on the street for good reason yeah just another cool angle to try again this isn't about you know the best camera angles from the outside of a car because that's really up to you and what works for your story but it's just one more tool that you can think about for specific situations that could really add to the visuals of a project so yeah keep it in mind that is a a unique angle and a unique perspective I could see doing a project about you know Farmers or game Rangers or anyone who's doing a lot of driving and this being like a really unusual and sort of action oriented perspective so yeah really really cool we're going to call it there though because it is snowing and we're driving around on poth hold roads in a big city so I think you get the idea the only limiting factor really is your imagination now the budget friendly option is something like GoPros and suction cup mounts and if you get the settings right and you have uh the right filters so that you can use a good frame rate then there's nothing wrong with GoPros and then if you want to try and boost the production from there and use something like a mirrorless camera or really even an fx9 it could easily hold the weight then something like the spider crab is your best option and then there's even more elaborate and expensive options after that but for the purposes of a documentary cinematography course we're going to say that that's about topof the line so I hope that video was useful and it gave you some ideas on how you can shoot with vehicles in different ways and bring your storytelling and cinematography to the next level

Channel: Luc Forsyth

Views: 14,859

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Id: 4vndeyKbY_I

Length: 30min 24sec (1824 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2024