Best Way to Shoot a car conversation scene

Brett

Brett

Well-known member
hey, well I've been working on a script for awhile and were about to start getting everything together and start shooting, but something that has been on my mind for awhile that I hope I can get a few suggestions or opinions.
Alot of the movie is happening in a car with lots of dialogue, how do you shoot without it getting boring? there's only so many angles you can get. i've got in my mind close up shots back and forth backseat angles, outside angles... that's about it, I need some creativity in these shots. any advice would be appreciated. thanks all.
 
From what i've found there are only so many angles you can have in any dialogue scenes. Of course you can always switch from Med. , CU , ECU etc to add some variety. In the end however it's still more about what they are saying that's going to keep people interested versus interesting shot angles all the time.
I hope this helps some
 
Watch your angles and don't cross the line or all of a sudden your driver will look like they're the passenger. You can get a tow dolly and get walk around shots and such. Also how much of the dialog can be cut out? Remember show don't tell especially dialogue between two charcaters for a long time can lose your audience in a hurry.
 
First of all, "Yes", car conversations can be very limiting, but whether they become boring or not can mostly depend on your story. Don't rely on camera angles to keep the audiences attention. Good, original dialogs will make or break a car conversation piece. With that being said, here is some of my technical advice for shooting car scenes.

Edit: Just read that this was pretty much said in a post above me somewhere... so I'll second that :)

My best advice is to study movies with car dialogs. I would recommend staying away from old rear projected Hollywood films. Study some more recent films.

Look into using a type of car rig which can mount the camera outside front side windows. If you want to attempt to shoot a car through the front windshield I would suggest a polarizing filter to reduce glare and reflections. Convertibles also allow for a wider range of shooting ability due to the open structure and allowing light into the interior of the car.

Mounting the camera and stabilizing it onto another vehicle can produce shots which can follow along but are not locked down onto the talent car.

I would study films with car convo's. You will most likely discover the shots are ordinary and not very interesting, but the conversation, characters and situation is great. Look into Blues Brothers, Pulp Fiction, Breathless, Little Miss Sunshine, Collateral, and so on. Those are just the ones I thought of first.

I would like others who read this to give suggestions on films with good movie car convo's.
 
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If you haven't, you should see about constructing some sort of window mount. I made one not too long ago (seen here with my old camera), and it's very useful. Between 4 windows and a decent tripod head off of ebay, you can get a lot of angles. Keep the windows rolled up with an external mic in the car and it'll sound great too. You can get good transitional shots with it as well, like the sides of car, the tires turning, etc.
carmount.jpg
 
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