Around the car shot?

DBoz699

DBoz699

Veteran
I was bored tonight in need of good entertainment..so i rented War of The Worlds...and it came up to the scene where Tom Cruise and his kids were in that van driving down that long road.

In this scene...the camera goes around the whole car with out cuts in the scene and change of angles..everytime someone starts talking..the camera turns around the car so the face is visable. Then at the end of the scene..the camera goes from the drivers side off into the air having the car in center frame and showing destruction..sorta like a crane shot...but it was all blended together.

How would they go about doing this? Blue screen?
And how would they set up the camera?
 
A dolly connected to the car. The car was most definitely on a track, and that means that it was moving involuntarily, without a driver, kind of like a Disney world ride. I would say they used a dolly for that, but they may have acheived it by doing really well seamless cut.

Not bluescreen, because the set was real. There was actually a plane there, that destruction was real. My friend has photos of them smiling in front of the plane. sick.
 
I loved that shot. I told someone about it and he replied that he wasn't impressed by it since it's all CGI. It's interesting since there's some validity to that argument. The long take represents the ultimate in control over figure movement, camera movement, and performance. Hardest to direct, hardest to light, hardest to act in. (Easiest to edit, though...) The long take is the ultimate combination of camera movement and mis-en-scene. But if you have unlimited control (CGI) anyhow, isn't it cheating? I'm almost tempted to think it is. (Imagine if Orson Welles had split diopters, greenscreens, and CGI for Citizen Kane....)

Pablo Helman of ILM says:

"We’ve got a three-minute shot and there is one shot in those three minutes and his thought was the cameras are going around and he never stops and comes out of the car. It was another one of those shots that we shot in seven different parts. We put together all these different parts and stunt people and real people and extras, and then it just looks like one fluid shot. After two or three minutes you start thinking, “Well, how did they do that?” There were two people that actually pulled the roof of the car out so the camera could go in and then as the camera went outside the car then they put the roof back in."


The thing is...it's definitely cheating, but it's still so complex and just to visualize such a shot is amazing and the removal/replacement of the roof is such a Wellesian long take trick, anyhow.
 
I prefer the imperfections of camera movmenet, the bumps of car mounts for a subtle real feeling rather than seemless cut.
 
if you seen behind the scene of the sin city they almost did the same thing , they shot it all in the green screen then they aded the backround , check it out its very interesting , the camera goes up and down and 2 guys spins the car around , when the put the backround , the shot from the front of the car thats moving, goes up spins and goes down to the rear of the car look good and simple to do
 
I forgot what movie it is but I have the DVD around here somewhere. I also forget what the contraption is called but they had a special crane/job arm attached to a Mercedes Benz SUV and it could speed up and down the highway and get some amazing shots that would close to impossible to get out on location....in a controlled setting like using blue screen with the car not going anywhere would be another way to do it.
 
The shot was pulled off in studio and using plate photography at the location - six panaflex cameras captured a 360 image of the background which was digitally stitched into a "moving dome" and the car was shot in studio. Tom Cruise sat in the car and someone remote controlled the steering wheel so the motion would match the live action plate - tom just rested his hands on the wheel and acted as though turning. It was six or seven seperate shots on the car which were blended digitally together to create the final seamless shot. Window reflections were put in later as were (probably) cars that pass nearby - and the shot was finally seamlessly handed over to a live shot of a car driving off at the location as the camera cranes up.

One nice subtle detail that they put in the windscreen is the presence of the "oil pattern" you sometimes get when photographing windscreens through a polarizing filter. Nice detail and shows ILM is on top of their game.

Hope this helps.
 
Fascinating thread. I went through that scene frame-by-frame to figure it out. Even cooler is that you don't even notice it unless looking for it -- nothing flashy or gimmicky about it. That's what makes it great.
 
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