How to FAKE driving scenes like David Fincher

yo Spencer Sakurai here so I'm trying to make a feature film this year I've actually been writing it for the past few weeks and a lot of this film takes place in vehicles I thought this might be an efficient way to making a low budget indie film but still kind of keep it exciting you know rather having a bunch of locations and set pieces I mean it'll have a lot of set pieces for sure but I'm trying to make like more than a third of the film take place in a car that way it should just be a lot easier to film and keep things a lot more contained plus I've always had an interest in cars I was really into cars in my you know my late teens and my 20s I've always had some sort of kind of sports car so I thought making a feature about something in a world that I actually knew a little bit about would be really helpful it's still going to be kind of a horror Thriller type film but with a little bit of a Twist on it it's just gonna be a mixed genre film um something that I don't think I've really seen before and I'm really excited to try to make it this year but when doing some research on this and thinking about the script I started thinking about how hard it is to actually film in cars at first I thought this was a really efficient idea to write a film inside cars but I was like I don't have a processed trailer I don't have these kind of nice rigs in order to get those shots but then it reminded me of David Fincher David Fincher isn't a control freak and he's one of my favorite directors you probably know that if you're a long time follower of the channel but if you've watched his films anything that he's basically done in the digital era he's used a blue screen on a stage to do his car shots he's done what's called the poor man's process trailer now obviously his isn't very poor man when we are looking at what he's got going on but what we're going to be doing in this video we're gonna be testing out the poor man's process trailer as an idea but I'm gonna do it differently I'm gonna do it more like David Fincher and what that means is we're going to use blue screen and background plates rather than using like rear projection or an LED wall or something like that obviously an LED wall isn't that conducive to lower budget stuff and the last time I used one I was able to make a deal in order to use one but when I was budgeting out this feature film and actually looking to LED walls again at full cost I just don't think it's going to work for this plus I don't know if LED walls are the way to go anyways the volume technology is really cool but what I don't like about it when you're actually using background plates you know to make it look as realistic as possible rather than using 3D environments you don't have as much control as you would think I want to be able to change my exposure and my saturation and have full control over the background and maybe move the background forward or backwards in post anyways we'll talk about more of that later in the video but so for me doing the David Fincher way with blue screen just made the most sense for me so that's what we're testing in today's video I want to do a quick and dirty test of shooting car plates and shooting interior car scenes using blue screen rather than attaching a camera to a car now in Hollywood that's what you would do you would use a what's a real process trailer it's basically taking your vehicle putting it on a trailer someone else is driving the car around that way your actors can act and do their lines and not have to worry about any dangerous it's very dangerous to act and drive I did a little bit of that in my last short film flea and first off it's really bad on audio and it's just really hard for the actors to hit their marks let alone when walking and then Translating that to driving it's just it's really not the way to do it plus in my film I'm going to have all sorts of different types of vehicles including drift cars and I don't think my I should expect my actors to be able to drift right so all this stuff really just needs to happen on a stage which doing on a stage or doing an environment with blue screen and stuff like that is just kind of amazing anyways because I'm going to be doing this with very little crew this time I'm going to be probably doing it with maybe a crew of five tops I'm gonna try to make this as low budget as possible this time and it's just gonna be so convenient to be able to shoot maybe in an air-conditioned environment and be able to just get the lines with clean audio and walk work things through with the actors and not have to worry about moving vehicles but that's all kind of hinging on this idea that I can do all this with blue screen on a stage so we're gonna to break down how I tested some of this out and I'm going to show you how I did it maybe this can help you next time with one of your projects so the first thing you're going to need obviously is a vehicle so for this I didn't have a stage to park my car on so I just use my backyard I've got a little concrete pad in the backyard and so I rolled my car back there and then I used one of my pop-up blue screens as a blue screen for the background now this is only I think like a five foot pop-up blue screen and ideally You're Gonna Want the biggest blue screen possible and I cannot emphasize this anymore now buying a blue screen on b h like a nine foot backdrop is not that expensive I would highly recommend buying a couple of those and doing that instead but for this I just was kind of a quick and dirty test so I also had a bunch of Fernie pads or moving pads that were blue very close to a chroma blue actually so I put the main portion of my blue screen you know around more like the main King had to happen and then I overlapped my Fernie pads on the edges to get a little bit more blue so I could wrap farther around car and this actually worked out pretty well I think it was obviously all proper blue screen it would work a lot better but for this test this totally worked but before we get too far into the actual setup of the car let's talk about the background plates because they're one of the most important pieces to this whole puzzle so you need to be able to film The a car in Motion in order to replicate that in post when you're pulling in the plates as your background later now there's a few ways you can do this first I thought it would make sense to get the most stable plate possible and then add shake and later so me my friend Drew linked to his YouTube down in the description below we went out we threw the red Komodo on a Gimbal and we drove around the block to see how that would work and it worked pretty well I mean the gimbal was stable obviously you know kind of sitting on his lap as we drove to shoot plates as if they were coming from the same perspective as where I was gonna put the camera on our interior shots but what happened is when you take a turn or something like that the gimbal doesn't really like that it tries to stay in one place and so the turns don't work out very well and then sometimes your gimbal might want to look up or down so your horizon line kind of changes um and what I found with that too is that you don't get the micro Jitters that you would get if you were actually driving which yes you could add those in post but getting some of that on your background plate already really helps sell this effect so I went out the next day and I decided to shoot this differently also originally I thought using the because I've talked to some friends that shoot big car stuff thank you John Carrington for some advice on this I thought shooting on the same focal length for the background would also best sell the effect right you're going to crop in the same focal length and I tried that at first too but that kind of limited me when I was doing my car shots and the interior car shots because if I wanted to back up the camera a little bit or push in a little bit I didn't have as much room in the background to work with so when I went out the second day to get plates I actually shot on a 24 millimeter rather than shooting on a 35 millimeter like I did before I set the focus to about a meter away which is roughly where the focus would be inside the car for most of the shot I shot it T28 to try to mimic what I was gonna be doing in the car which was shooting around T2 or T28 and then if I wanted to add more blur in post I could and I wanted to do this kind of send the background out of focus ahead of time to make it look as natural as possible and I could always add a little more blur later I think a lot of things say that you should probably just shoot as deep as possible and to do your blur and posts but I thought it would just probably look the most believable this way and that's how David Fincher does it he shoots his plates I believe mostly out of okay so I tried it this way and I I like the results this way and so I'm probably going to keep trying it like that so I shot on the 24 that way I could crop in and post and move the image around and have more flexibility and then I shot it stable as I could but allowing those Micro Drifters to come through while driving now this works out well because once you do get it in post you can actually stabilize the footage which takes out the you know the big bumps in the footage but it leaves in a little bit of those macro Jitters which really sells the effect I also found that you know shooting in a neighborhood or something like that you have so much opportunity for Parallax it actually makes the footage look a little bit more confusing it's a little bit harder to make it look accurate so if you watch a show like mine hunter which is a David Fincher creation they are in the car all the time in that show and all of all of those car shots are fake they're all done on a stage now they're using LED Wall bits to add Reflections on the car and stuff which I wasn't able to do here obviously but they're mostly using blue screen and with that you'll notice they're always like in the rural Countryside and things are very far from them the farther your background is from your subject the more believable it is when you're doing these background plates so I decided to go out on a little bit of a wider road to get this plate that seemed to help a lot the trees were farther away and just made it look a little bit more believable that being said I did also drive by some cars on this but because I use that different focal length if for some reason this one just felt better um so the car is coming up pretty close to me actually helps sell the effect even more it actually worked out that way okay so that's how I'd recommend doing this plates I think in an Ideal World which we should talk about the ideals as well in this video the ideal thing would be to get an actual car mount and strap your camera to your car and so you get perfectly stable footage with the car but also get those micro Jitters so when I film this for my actual movie I'm definitely going to try to use a car mount instead of doing it handheld like I did this time but once again this is just a quick and dirty test so another trick John taught me was that you should when you go to get your plates film the driver driving while you're getting your plates because you can use the light coming in through the windows on the video as a reference for the actual plates um now this isn't something you have to exactly replicate but it is nice to have some sort of reference so if you're going under a tree or something and the light Fades away when you shoot your interior shots you can actually have the light fade away at the same time this is all just going to add to that believability say you're doing night shots and you're driving by like a red neon sign well note that um and then you can actually put up a little red during that section of the driving so so what's the place we're done then it was time to shoot the actual interior bits and so to do this I like I said I have my blue screen set up behind me it's about six feet away um I did this a few different times testing it out and I found that getting this far away from the blue screen as possible is definitely the key now at least I get the biggest blue screen and be more than 12 feet away maybe 15 20 feet away so you have less spill coming at the car um I was just using sunlight to do this you know obviously if you properly lit the green screen with proper lighting and even maybe adding a little bit of blue to your blue screen um that's going to make that key look might be much more even and a lot easier but for this I was just using the Sun so because it was only like six feet from the car and I was using the sun there was a lot of Bounce coming back at me but I was still able to get a pretty believable key out of this even with those problems but I highly recommend not doing it that way and I will definitely be doing it with a bigger screen for my film so next you're going to want to light your subject so um a lot of times on a process trailer you'll have some sort of like Sky panel or some sort of right in front of the windshield to just make sure there's constant elevation on your subject now of course this can act as your key light but you don't want it just to be one harsh light the whole time because people will start to notice that you know that doesn't really happen in reality so what I did was I took my manlight 720b I put a softbox on it a nice four foot soft box and I lit myself like that which is kind of believable it's like kind of like the sun is there it's a big circular Source it's not too soft but it has enough punch to give us exposure inside the dark interior and then to make it look like I was moving and the lights were changing I switched over to the pulsing mode on the m720b and I had it pulse about every four seconds from like a 30 percent to like a 100 brightness so it kind of faded in and out as I was driving which really helped sell the effect now you Additionally you could have someone be waving something in front of it or you could have trees go by or something like that so if you had more people to help you with this you can add even more effects in the background like you know have lights come in and out this is all things that you can do to help sell that the car is moving but for me just doing it like this you know on a nice little close-up just having that one light pulse really was effective then on my first test I didn't really have any more lights behind me but on my second test I decided to put a tube light in the background also with a pulse just to add a little bit of glow in the background you can barely notice it in the test but it's enough to like I said help sell that movement effect happening with the car and so this all comes down to control doing it this way gives you the most control possible when shooting cars so before we get into the next 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for sponsoring this video so when shooting the actual interior shots another thing that I try to avoid was shooting the mirrors or the side mirror because in post you're going to have to go in and comp those out and put in another plate which when you are doing your background plates I would say in an ideal world you would have multiple cameras shooting all at once while you drive your car around to get those plates and that way you can have the back so like if you wanted to turn the camera more well you could have a plate for that background or you can use that background you know from behind the car to reflect in the mirrors so for this purpose since I was just doing a quick and dirty test I just wanted to do one side play and when I was framing I just avoided the mirrors altogether now in this scenario you might might want to sacrifice your composition a little bit in order to make the shot the most believable and so just avoiding the mirrors altogether might be the move for that but if you are going to have a mirror in there just make sure you have a plate to comp in later for the reflection in the mirror so for this I was using my red Komodo like I said I ended up just using the Sigma 18 to 35 because I had autofocus for my interior plates and I needed the autofocus because I was filming by myself the second time I did this test and then I ended up shooting in the high quality on the red Komodo I talk about I usually shoot on medium quality on the camera but that's where the high quality is there for is getting the most resolution in color depth imaginable so the high quality is going to really help you when you're doing visual effects stuff and you need more color information to key and this did help me in the end I was doing medium quality originally and it was getting really hard with the blue spill but these are all things that can be mitigated later you don't have to have such a high quality camera to do that for sure you just need to control that blue spill coming in on your car and the reason I use blue over a green is mostly because the blue is going to be a little bit more believable and easier to key if you have a little bit of spill on the car it's going to be believable because the sun is already blue and if you do something like I did where I was shooting outside under trees using green would be really hard because you probably have a lot more green coming in from those trees and so when you go to key it out you might start keying out spots of the vehicle that you don't want to key out but that brings us kind of into post when you do get into posts you can always just mask around the windows when you're doing your key and so you can worry less about some of that spill that's happening I just took some of the blue spill that was inside the car and desaturated it later to make it look less like it was actually blue from a blue screen so in post it's pretty simple you're just going to layer you know your shots together so you're going to put your plates down first what I did with those plates is I stabilized that plate so it looked as smooth as possible but still keeping those macro Jitters like I said before and then I'm layering in the interior shots on top of that and for me I'm using DaVinci Resolve but whatever keyer you're using you know I just selected the blue background and um keyed that out the best I could obviously you'll have to a nest this for your key or the software that you're using doing chroma key work is its own video so you'll probably have to there's plenty of videos online to figure out how to do that part like I said masking around was really helpful for me I messed up on a couple spots so you'll see that it's not perfect but for this quick test I feel like it really sells and so for like processing it I just made sure that I kept the background in the foreground Rec 709 to begin with and I actually desaturated the background a little bit something about it being desaturated as if it's coming through windows or because it's farther away from the camera I don't know that just helps sell the effect for me as my base color and then once you're done with all of your compositions you're able to compound the clip together and then color it as if you were coloring a raw clip which also really helps sell the whole effect because then now you're adding color to a clip that is already acting as one something else you can do to really sell this effect is you can add some Reflections to the windows so I shot this with the windows up hoping that some of the little Reflections could come through but in the end I just keyed out the whole window but what you can do is actually just take a little mask from like my like for instance in this shot I have my arm up against the window and if you look at that in reality when the Sun hits your arm it's going to reflect back at the window and so I just took that shot I mirrored it up you know vertically I just kind of flipped the image and then I use the screen effect and I lower the opacity and I was able to basically make it look like my arm was reflecting off the window which is another way of really helping to sell this adding those Reflections back in and stuff like that to make it look like you're interacting more with the environment I'm sure you could throw a little dirt on the window or something like that as well to really sell it but I'm no visual effects artist so I'm not going to get into any of that stuff today this is more of a proof of concept for me going into the film which will all later have help with when I go to do the actual post on the film something else you can do is at this point you could add camera shake so once you've compounded your Clips together and you have a new Fresh clip you can use like an effect like camera shake and add that in which will then you know move the the entire image which does help sell like as there's cameras shooting this you know in real life the ideal way of doing this is actually to get your own tracking for these camera shakes so you could put some trackers in the foreground and drive the car around and add a little shake like this to the camera and then you could track that in later and add that data to your image which would give you a more natural Shake but I was just using the built-in one in resolve I ended up not loving it so I didn't use it on this main test that I keep showing you but on one of these tests I did which was you know like I said I'm gonna have drift cars in my film so I had one little test where I kind of shifted the car and acted like it was more of an action scene and I put in a pretty aggressive Shake there and that really helped sell the car moving like there's motion happening with the car which all this comes together right like you have to do every piece of the puzzle to help make it look more believable and with that is also adding some sound effects and timing everything out right that feels the most real so if you put that Shake in there like when I shift the car this it shakes that's gonna make it more believable cool put a little music in there a little sound effects and all of these things come together to trick the audience into thinking that it's real now something I would recommend is make sure that you're always having extra shots to add context to these shots if you hang on one of these too long the audience's brain is smart right it's gonna start picking up on the fact that it's fake now Hollywood does this all the time and we're pretty used to it geez if you watched a Marvel movie it pretty much all looks fake anyways but for this I want mine to look as realistic as possible and ground the film as much as I can so what I'm going to do is definitely be able to cut from the outside shots of a car just driving with a stunt double or whatever and then cut back into these shots and also not hang on to them too long I think it's important to make sure you're cutting back and getting coverage and moving around the car enough that the audience doesn't get too much time to really analyze the frame to me when I watch Like mind Hunter and stuff I never really pay attention to the car shots and that they're fake but now that I've been going back and researching the more I look at them I'm like wow there's so many flaws in here but I never noticed those when I was actually watch watching this show so this is my version of the Poor Man's process trailer I'm definitely going to be using some sort of stage with bigger blue screens and maybe even a few more lights and properly lighting the background and all that stuff and you know using multiple cameras for the for the plates and the car rig when I do this for my movie but for a quick and dirty little test I feel like this really sells using this so maybe you're shooting a commercial or something you only need like one quick shot in a car but it's unsafe for the actor to drive well this is definitely the way to do it and what's going to be great about this too is I feel like when I go to actually shoot the car scenes I'm going to be able to shoot so many scenes in such a short amount of time because if we're talking just a couple cars you just roll one in roll one out change the lighting just a little bit and then you're shooting and it's probably going to be the fastest way of doing any sort of setup that I would do in the film and so I'm able to knock out those car scenes really fast which is gonna be really great for my low budget that I'm going to be working with when I make this film which stay tuned for that there was obviously going to be some behind the scenes content of me making that film I'll be doing some sort of crowdfunding campaign here shortly probably somewhere around the time I release flea which hopefully I'll be releasing that soon as well so stay tuned for all that I'm excited to get that out in the world but I think that's all I have for this video if you have any questions about this test leave those comments down below until next time guys I'm sensor Sakurai see ya foreign [Music]

Channel: Spenser Sakurai

Views: 12,094

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Id: Dp6YronfiJc

Length: 21min 32sec (1292 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2023