Interior Car Scenes Night

L

LarrySmith17

Member
Hey Guys,

I read something on here about shooting inside a car. But My question is, how can I shoot interior of a car at night without it being on the road. How would I go about making it realistic on a very--VERY! tight budget
 
Oppressor_LOB last year shot some interior night car scenes for a music video, and they were really well done. Oppressor, can you weigh in on how you lit and shot those? And give us a link to some screen grabs maybe?
 
I just recently read an article (about 2 years old actually now) about Rodney Charters, CSC (I think) who shoots Fox's 24. He talked about how all of their car scenes utilize a rear projection method. The basic primer on this is that a plate, or video of the street going past is projected from behind onto a white surface, placed behind the car. The scene is then filmed in front of the screen while the car is stationary and if done right, looks very compelling. It's important to try to minimize differences in lighting and camera shake (try to make both shots locked down) to avoid the cheesey artificial look often associated with this technique when used in old movies around the 40s and 50s. The 24 setup uses 3 screens running at once, but it can easily be acheived with one screen that is moved around depending on the angle of the new shot. See if you can find the article on the American Cinemaographer Magazine site. Hope that helps.
Peace,

-Harry
 
Well...u can film it on a green screen...then in post you can add the passing street lights if your good at compositing and the background...if u know someone with a pickup truck...strap the tripod in the pickup...sit with it..film the car driving...and use that..

or...move the light back and forth..or like...have something spinning over the light every few seconds so the light passes the windshield and car to give it more a dramatic look.

flourecent lights in a car for lighting the characters is good....if u watched Collateral...and the behind scenes..you'll see that they put like 10 flourecent office lights on the seats and stuff.
 
well, for the lighting I use these little tube flouros that i can stuff anywhere in the car and they give enough light for any situation. They are daylight balanced too but I think you were talking about how to get it looking like you are moving through the windows right? Uhaul rents a car towing thing you can hook up to another car and pull the one you want to shoot in. Cine saddle works great as a tripod for these shots if you shoot through the front window. Also use a polorizer to cut through the glare on the window. If you cant move the car, frame so you just see one window behind each person and stretch some green or blue cloth or paint a big enough piece of foam core. If thats not big enough you can get a big piece of sheet rock for cheap too. You can use the green from kids colors types of paint it works just as well. Just make sure that the clothes they wear contrast against the green. Try not to use white shirts because it picks up the slight glow of green if the board is too close. Then all you have to do is film out the window of a moving car to get the footage to composite.
 
rent the DVD "frailty", the horror movie by Bill Paxton of "game over man!" fame.

In the behind the scenes video they step you through how they did the driving scenes in a studio. No greenscreens, no plates, just a camera on a tripod and some well placed shadows from regular set lights. It amazed me when I saw it beucase you can usually tell when someone is shooting "poor mans" car footage.
 
If shooting in an INT of a car and under controlled settings...

I would use a combination of Rear Projection and practical effects.

For rear projection you can rent a DVD projector; go film your plate, transfer to DVD and project the background onto the screen.

For practical effects; I'd use a sort of Chinese lantern spinning effect. Put odd patterns into lamp shades or the lanterns and spin them. The light should come off as passing street lights and cars.

Thats my lo/no approach
 
Have it dark ouside and pan some lights on the car and actors at periodic intervals to suggest movement (don't light up your dark static background though).

To further hide the illusion if you could spritz (wet) the window to obscure the backgound outside if the script allowed it - the droplets diffuse what is outside - super smart might be to get a fan and blow the water droplets - suggesting the wind and momentum of driving) and, if your shot were profile, you could - in the background - reverse a car through frame (as though your drivers were overtaking someone on the road) to complete the illusion. If you're front on (looking through the front windcreen) you could have a car behind them with the headlights on. (it should move a little but subtle back and forward should suggest that it's keeping pace with their car.

Subtly shake the camera as though the car were vibrating and traversing the odd mild bump in the road - a kind of rhythmical back and forth. (don't forget to have the actors do the same and keep it subtle.)

Good luck.
 
if you're going to move the camera - and I wouldn't suggest moving the CAMERA to simulate bumps, move the CAR instead. Just a small amount of pressure now can be pretty convincing. Cars sway more than they shake - while shooting greenscreen, I'd recommend you also have tracking markers on your screen. Otherwise you'll just be playing by intuition when it comes to compositing, which will take you a lot longer to get looking realistic. That's assuming your camera is mounted on the car and therefore moving relative to the screen. If it's not, you would be fine.

As for lighting the car itself, the easiest and most configurable solution would probably be a couple small LitePanels. You can tuck them pretty much anywhere and dial them up or down as needed. They're a bit expensive but there's cheap knockoffs out there.

I actually didn't know that was how they shot on 24. Kudos to them, I never would have guessed it wasn't process trailer shots.
 
When I worked on The Adventures of Sebastion Cole we put the truck in a Duvy tent, Cam was on a tripod in front of truck. We had 2 lighting gags(in addition to the Kino's in the truck): one was to simulate street lights, it was a small lamp on the end of a gobo arm in a Cstand that we spun around over the truck, the highest riser on the cstand wasnt locked down, but sitting on top of the next riser. The other gag was a red/yellow/green stop light deal that reflected onto the truck and actors. They had already shot the plate, so we watched it for the timing of the lights and a couple grips gave the truck some bumps to simulate movement.They put the plate in in post. I just saw the finished project recently and I was suprised at how good it looks.
And i forgot i was in the movie, that was a bonus, a bouncer at the bar in NYC, hehe, my 8 seconds of fame in front of the cam :D
Hope this was helpful or maybe gave you some ideas to work with.
 
I recently did a commercial under Darius Khondji, and the setup was quite similar to the one described above. The lighting gags were just set up to simulate brake lights from the motorcycle ahead, and then headlights from a car chasing behind. I didn't have tons of time to figure out what they were doing as I was in Camera dept. but I know that for the brake light effect the Best Boy just swung a 650 aroundin front of the car, and for part of it, the 650 was on a dolly, and they moved the dolly back and forth, while moving the lights to that it appeared as though not only the was the car ahead moving, but that our car was also swerving left and right. Above and beyond that, there was also a streetlight effect that was a low pressure sodium (orange streetlight) mounted off to one side, and a piece of lexan was rotated in front of it that had some ND paint smeared on it, so that the street lights dimmed, dissapeared and reappeared more naturally. Two PAs rocked the car, and Khondji operated handheld to get more kinetic movement in the frame. I hope this helps.

I dub this post "Second-hand Khondji"
 
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