Car hits man....

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BryD959

Member
I need a man to be hit by a car. I would like to film inside the car and have the camera pan up quickly to see a man standing in the street. The car should be moving relatively fast as the man hits the cars hood, then flies up over the windsheild. Anybody ever done anything like this. No budget, no green screens, no fx software. Its gotta be done all in front of the cam. Any ideas?
 
Find an actor that is suicidal. Only kidding. With no FX software, this is a big feat. This is realy a pretty big budget stunt with a lot of hazards. Not sure what to tell you.

My only solutions would be using some basic FX.
 
Shoot it in reverse; meaning STAGE it in reverse

Start with camera up and have actor roll down windshield onto hood and into a standing position as the car reverses away (as actor is officially off of car).

IN post it can be ramped up a bit for speed

(This is what I would do)

I think with clever editing and proper sound fx (Foley, fx, ADR) it can be sold
 
thanks for the ideas... I was thinking the same thing, shoot in reverse. Do you know of any footage in which someone pulled this off in a convincing manner.

how about shooting it slowly Not in reverse. Have the car slowly drive 5 mph? towards the actor and film it that way.

Which would be more convincing?

Thanks
 
BryD959 said:
how about shooting it slowly Not in reverse. Have the car slowly drive 5 mph? towards the actor and film it that way.
Click to expand...

Possibly too many things you can't control the speed of (leaves on trees, a bird, even dust blowing by...depending on circumstances), but even gestures of the driver and pedestrian can be difficult to make look natural when speeded up.

And there's always the "Whoops, I thought that was the brakes" problem.

Do it backwards. Fast cuts in editing will help. 1: tumbles down the front of the car. 2: look of horror on the driver's face. 3: Look of horror on the pedestrian's face. 4: car speeding toward pedestrian.

Then reverse the clips and order them 4, 3, 2, 1.
 
I saw a video on here once that was done with two takes. 1st shot was done with the car driving by. the second shot was of a man standing in the street, well marked ofcourse. they used split screen compositing to show him getting hit. If you have a good actor and some mats, maybe you could have him/her simulate the motion and land back down on the ground. Then just split composite the landing out and show only the getting hit part. I don't know it sound good in theory.......
 
Here is one that I did a couple of years ago when first got into indie filmmaking. It was shot on a plain jane GL-2. It is much like what RGB has explained. It is the fourth clip down the page of the link "car hit". I used After Effects to composite the two clips together. With a little more time and planning, it could work great in combination with the in camera tricks mentioned above.

http://snodart.com/clips.php
 
i wish i would have seen this thread earlier ... we did a man getting hit by a car this summer and we shot it completely from the interior of the car with a camera jerk for the impact. : /
 
snodart said:
Here is one that I did a couple of years ago when first got into indie filmmaking. It was shot on a plain jane GL-2. It is much like what RGB has explained. It is the fourth clip down the page of the link "car hit". I used After Effects to composite the two clips together. With a little more time and planning, it could work great in combination with the in camera tricks mentioned above.

http://snodart.com/clips.php
Click to expand...

The car and baseball bat hits on your site are great. It is amazing how much the sound contributes to the reality of the impact.

Chris
 
If you want to see multiple shots of a man hitting a car, google a video called "Rabbit in your headlights" by a band called UNKLE.

My suggestion would be to throw out the ideas of special effects and hire a homeless drunk to do the stunt work. Cheap labour plus they probably won't feel any pain for a few days and by then you're outta there.
 
Snodart, the baseball bat clip was great, I knew the clip was about somebody getting hit with a bat but I didn't expect that. LOL
 
Pretty impressed with Snodart's work. Great idea as well, John Hudson, about doing the shot in reverse ... I wouldn't have though to that, and believe it could turn out EXTREMELY well ... especially if cut in with other shots/angles.
 
Problem is when do you cut to it?

and unles you have gazillions, then it won't look very real.

This is the way brad pitt gets creamed in Meet Joe Black.

He walks into the intersection, hits a certain pose, then they replace him with a dummy that can stand up in about that pose, then they hit the dummy and composited the two shots. ... but they had an expensive dummy and CGI team to match the poses etc.

http://www.anatomorphex.com/FX209_M.html

MU109_BRAD_PITT.jpg
 
Everyone in my theatre -- including me -- burst out laughing actually.

Don't know if it looked too real to handle or if rge way that thing flopped around didn't look quite real -- I mean there was no broken glass on either car.
 
My favorite one was the bus hit in Final Destination. Saw nothing, actually, but...damn.

Didn't care at all for the one I saw on the street in Bucharest. (Which didn't look like a movie at all.)
 
The problem with many of these ideas is that you're missing a serious component of the hit: the damage to the car. A guy hitting the car at any real speed is going to break the windshield, if nothing else. I've done this shot... and how did we do it? The real deal.

A friend of mine is an ex-stuntman and he just took the hit. The car was going about 20mph, and he hits the door, cracks open the windshield with the back of his skull, then flips over the top of the car and flops down face-first in the dirt. He was wearing a special plate (sort of armor) for his spine, but other than that it was just authentic. We rolled 3 cameras simultaneously and it didn't even need speeding up to look terrifying.

Now, I'm not absolutely not recommending this method for YOU to try with your cast. But there are a lot of stuntmen out there, and this is what they do. I'm sure you could find one who wouldn't charge too much for the shot. The only hitch is they might need insurance.
 
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