Cars that turn on themselves and leave almost intact, that reach a vertigo speed zigzagging down the road without losing direction or that jump obstacles to land in a meadow without breaking the shock absorbers are scenes that we usually see in the cinema. But how do they roll? Do they have a trick? Are they made with scale cars? are real? One of the techniques is to shoot at a very slow speed , sometimes so slow that there is little risk of damage to the bodywork. Later, in the editing room, the scene accelerates until it seems that the cars are going 200 per hour and they make us bounce in the seats.
When this trick cannot be used, stuntmen are used, specialist pilots who are in charge of filming the stunts . And the cars that are used are subjected to changes to improve driver safety. The most common is to improve the shock absorbers so that they can withstand large jumps and the additional weight of supporting the cameras that are usually placed on them.
Larger diameter brakes and carbo-ceramic discs are also used, an idea that emerged in the aviation industry and was later implemented in Formula 1 races. Today they are driven by many high-end cars. The advantage of these discs is that they not only have a very high stopping power but are also very resistant to breakage.
Sure, that’s how modern movies are shot because in the 70s everything was more rudimentary. In the movie60 seconds, from 1974, which includesone of the most famous and longest car chases in movie history 93 cars were destroyed, because in those days great special effects were not used. The spectacular jump from ten meters of height of the yellow Eleanor to black stripes was authentic and many of the accidents that appear were not programmed but they really happened.
In general, we can say that the cars, motorcycles and trucks that the cinema destroys in races, chases, crashes or explosions are totally authentic and real.Many times they are taken out of scrap yards and tuned. For example, if a car is blown up in an explosion, the only thing that is required to shoot the scene may be the bodywork. But in the chases, the cars are not only real, they have undergone a thorough revision to adapt them to the effort required by the sequence.
When a car has a lot of prominence in a movie, it is normal for them to be used on setseveral same models. For example, there were 12 versions of the Blues Brothers car inRogues at full speed(1980), a film that for a time also held the record for automobile crashes; all were second-hand and were purchased from the California Traffic Patrol.
Later films likeTwo Rebel Cops 2(2003) do not hesitate to mix real vehicles with others created by computer to make the chases more spectacular. In general, in recent years, virtual reality is replacing real cars. An exception was the Ferrari that Martin Lawrence drove in the aforementioned film: it was not only real but belonged to the film’s director, Michael Bay.
