Filming in a car in general can become very tricky if you don't know what you are doing, specially when it involves a lot of dialogue, a lot of people and people coming in and out of the car. In our film we have 3 car scenes, one with the four main characters and the other 2 with just 2 of them. For each of them I required to use a bit of a different technique, because the way the scene developed, forced me into making things a bit different and more interesting for the viewer. I worked with two main camera units, the Sony EX and a Go Pro Hero 4 Black. Before going into the shooting, I did a little bit of research regarding filming in a car and although the majority of tips and techniques are based for MOVING cars, which wasn't our case, some of them gave me ideas or made my head a bit more clear in what I needed to look at in order to make those shots work. I had to work a lot with my director and the sound guy because there were occasions in which I was inside the car without being able to listen to any of them, which made those scenes an ever bigger trusting circle. I will be talking about how I embraced those situations and the things that worked and didn't.
The first thing I did was to look at some videos that showed some techniques on how to film on a car. A lot of them talk about moving cars and some about filming the exterior of a car, which is not the case with us, but they were still great info for any future shoots that involve a car. Here are some of the videos that I had a look at, followed by a brief explanation about them:
Since at least half of the information on this videos was not useful for our shoot, I will be explaining what I got from them and how I implemented those techniques into our scenes. On the first video there are some really advices on where to place the camera in order to tell the mood of someone. Having a camera from the wind mirror looking inside the car where you only see the driver, can become a shot of someone thinking, is a very private shot as you are seeing from outside what is happening on the inside which doesn't just apply literally to the inside and outside of the car, but also to the inside of this characters mind and facial expressions seen from an outer point of view. Being inside or outside the car can send a message without saying a word and that is something I personally didn't know about. I implemented this style on the car scene in which Nath and Tom are arriving to the boxing place, where Nath sees what looks like a drug dealer sitting next to where they parked. The fact that I showed this from the inside, as a POV with the window up, shows safety and that personal shield that people tend to have in front of them in some situations. I never showed Tom looking through that window at the drug dealer, because instead of having a shy and 'innocent' personality like Nathan, he is more of a strong character, meaning that he makes Nathan a bit more confident that nothing is going to happen, hence the reason I don't show that window anymore after that. This might sound a bit complicated, but it is something that I learned about telling a story through a shot and in this case using the elements of a car.
The second video is about the GoPro, which became an usual when it came down to shooting the car scenes. Wether we thought we needed them or not, I decided to record all the scenes with them, which actually expanded my possibilities quite a lot. I had never used a GoPro on a car before or even on the suction mount like explained on the video, but I believe it was a good tool. The idea behind this was to get a clear shot from the inside of the car where we could see all the characters, meaning that this shot was going to become our wide shot where I was going to cut to as a safe shot. In order to make this work properly I had to play around with it first, because the first question that popped in everyones head was, how are going to see what the GoPro is recording if it doesn't have a screen? In order to fix this issue I had to download the GoPro app on my iPad Pro, which I took to the set to make it the screen that we needed to have. Although there a bit of a delay between the live of the camera and the Wi-Fi stream to the iPad, it was clearly visible and worked out pretty well. Here are some images of how it looked and what the screen looked like:
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| GoPro Footage |
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| iPad Pro Live Stream |
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| Sunday league crew monitoring the GoPro |
One of the issues that I had with this, which at the moment I didn't take into consideration, was that the the audio and video started going out of sync on my computer during the time of editing. At first I wasn't sure of what it was and I thought it was just the wrong audio track, but it was the right one. I finally realized that the problem was that the GoPro records in 30fps and the audio we were recording from clip mics attached to the Sony EX, which was recording in 25fps. I believe this was definitely the issue and that is why the video from the GoPro goes out of sync with the audio from the Sony EX. I have managed to fix this in post, which only took me less than an hour to fix, but I think this was a very good problem that needed to happen so in the future I remember to keep an eye on this kind of stuff to prevent more work in post.
The other thing I learned from the research was where the place characters in the car. Usually when we see a car scene with a family, you will most likely always find the parents in the front seats and the kids in the back. Even if one of the sons is 25, you still see them in the background and that has to do with establishing power and a hierarchy. In our case we didn't have a family, but we did have 4 friends in a car, from which of course one of them was the driver, but it came down to placing the other 3. Although this is more of a directors decision where to place who, I also gave my input based on the research I made. The idea was to put Tom (the driver) and Dean on the front of the car, because them 2 are the ones with a stronger personality among them 4. Dean is the captain of the team, the leader among them and Tom, apart from being the owner of the car and driver, has a also a very strong personality and could be potentially called the second in command. Nathan and Ollie were sent to the back because it fitted their personalities as well and they are more like the people in the middle of the conflict.
http://www.provideocoalition.com/how-to-shoot-car-videos-inside-out/
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