Hollywood Road

In the early morning of the same day, the Venice warehouse studio was full of hustle and bustle. A filming team of nearly a hundred people came out from the back door of the studio and assembled a dozen shooting vehicles that had bypassed the huge warehouse studio. Under Murphy's command, they began to work in an orderly manner Prepare for work and make the final sprint for the next shooting. ??

Behind the warehouse studio, there was originally an abandoned open-air material storage area. The preparation had just begun, and Murphy asked Gal Gadot to contact the original owner of the land, bought the place from him, and paid the final price. It was quickly transformed into a very flat open-air shooting area, which is used for shooting some action scenes.

Several huge green screens were quickly set up. Although Murphy advocated the real shooting as much as possible this time, the traffic in New York is heavy, especially in Manhattan, which is the main location, and wants to clear an entire road for shooting the hot scene. The car chase scene is not so difficult. After many discussions, Murphy still decided to set up a green screen for some of the big scenes to shoot on the set, and then replace them with real scenes in Manhattan later.

Most of the shots taken today were of Chris Dann riding an upgraded version of the Super Motorcycle crazily forward. Murphy went to the stuntman to have a look. This kind of scene would definitely not let Henry Cavill himself On stage, if he gets injured, the crew can't afford it. The special crew has already hired three stunt doubles who are very similar in size to Henry Cavill.

Chris Dann is masked throughout, and there is no super close-up close-up, so there is no need to use actors at all.

Then, Murphy came to the camera crew, and Phil Lascher was standing on top of a huge Ford pickup truck converted into a built-in camera car, adjusting the bulky Imax camera.

"How's the preparation going?" Murphy asked.

Hearing Murphy's voice, he made an 'ok' gesture, "No problem!"

It wasn't until the debugging was completed that Philip Raschel raised his head, looked at Murphy and said, "Another miniature camera, I had someone install it on the motorcycle yesterday, and the debugging has been completed."

Originally, Murphy wanted to use the forward rush of the plane when it took off to shoot the first perspective forward shot of Chris Dann riding a motorcycle to increase the impact of the shot, but the plane is an extremely expensive luxury after all. If you want to install a huge and bulky Imax camera, you must make a huge modification to the aircraft. No one wants to do this. Even Gulfstream declined Murphy's modification on the leased aircraft.

Murphy's own plane will have to wait until January next year at the earliest, and he can't wait for the time, so he still adopted some methods when filming "City of Chaos", installing the camera on Chris Dann's motorcycle to shoot , For some other shots, professional racing drivers were hired to set up the camera on top of the super sports car to shoot.

Although the impact of the first-person view lens obtained in this way is not as good as the original idea, it can barely meet Murphy's requirements.

Shooting is like this, there are always some unexpected situations, and the director must find a solution.

All departments quickly finished their preparations. After the stunt driver rode on the motorcycle, Murphy also got on the platform of the camera car. Then, with an order, the filming officially started.

The motorcycle that looks like a black ghost, under the driving of a stuntman, rushes forward like lightning. The camera car is located on the right side of the motorcycle, and the speed is not slow at all, almost always running parallel to the motorcycle at the same speed , in order to facilitate the shooting of Murphy and Philip Raschel on the vehicle-mounted photography platform.

The motorcycle rushed nearly 2,500 feet, and Murphy's eyes left the lens of the Imax camera, and shouted at Mike, "Very good! This one is over, the camera car changes to the left, and continue shooting!"

After finishing speaking, he patted the roof of the black pickup truck hard, and when the driver stopped the car and looked back, he gave the driver a thumbs up.

Frankly speaking, the shooting of this scene was not tested by stuntmen at all, but by the driver of the camera car.

On the basis of the smooth running of the car,

It is not so easy to keep pace with the motorcycle at a very fast speed, and it requires quite good driving skills.

In fact, from high-speed car chase scenes like this to various luxury car advertisements, it is not difficult for interested people to find that drivers who drive camera cars often have higher driving skills than stuntmen.

Of course, the camera car with excellent performance specially modified by Murphy also contributed a lot.

There will be a lot of car chase scenes in this shooting, so Murphy specially hired a professional company and team to transform nearly ten various shooting cars according to some of his ideas.

According to their different shooting needs, there are various models and sizes of camera cars, so that cameras can be installed and erected on the car body, but without exception, they are all painted in matte black, because in this way, they do not reflect light, and more Good for shooting.

There is a long history of using dolly shots in Hollywood.

If the camera car can be traced back to the first use, when the film "Ben-Hur: The Story of Christ" was filmed in 1925, a camera was mounted on the car, which can be said to be the earliest origin of this tool.

Today, the technical means of the camera car has been adjusted and is still used today, just like Murphy's shooting today, it is now mostly used with green screen.

Murphy is now using a specially modified embedded camera car. The entire camera platform is modified from a Ford Raptor so that a bulky Imax camera can be erected.

Because the bracket is inlaid on the car, it allows a series of different cameras and lights to be erected, such as flat-panel shooting or crane shooting. This kind of embedded camera car also has the electrical function of driving any camera and lighting equipment. If Instead of being on set, Murphy can sit in the cab and watch the monitors while the camera operators do the actual filming on the rig platform.

The crew quickly reset, and the only difference from the previous shooting was that the camera car was changed to the left side of the motorcycle.

For this kind of shooting, as long as the camera car remains stable and synchronized with the motorcycle, there is basically not much difficulty, and the second shooting also passed.

Then Murphy asked the crew to change the scene and came to a specially constructed curve to shoot a shot of Chris Dann almost touching the ground during the high turn of the motorcycle.

Here, Murphy trades in another camera truck - a synthetic trailer!

Using this type of composite trailer is usually close to the ground in order to capture a frame that is at or below the level of the driver in the vehicle, but allows the camera to achieve a wider shot in horizontal width.

This kind of trailer has more restrictions. Fortunately, in North America, if it is filmed in Australia, this kind of equipment must be accompanied by the police when it is used, and a professional license is required to operate it.

However, what Murphy uses is not an ordinary synthetic trailer. In order to shoot Chris Dann, a motorcycle that can move laterally, a special modification has been made to the rear wheels of the trailer. "Smart Rear Wheel" for lateral movement.

In a true traverse, all four wheels of the trailer can be switched to traverse mode when filming lateral movement of a motorcycle. This movement also has an additional function called autorotation, where the angle of the wheels can be set so that the camera can rotate 360 ​​degrees around its own center.

Correspondingly, the stability of the synthetic trailer is a bit worse. Although the shooting is a moving shot, Murphy has always disliked the constantly shaking shots in the film. When such a moving shot is finally shot, the picture still looks more smooth.

In order to meet this requirement, the ground of this curve is also specially made. During the preliminary preparations, Murphy asked someone to lay an additional layer of dance boards, which is commonly known in the industry.

To make the camera car move smoothly and without shaking, it can only be done on a smooth floor. If there is no place to place the track, or the moving track is not straight or curved, then the crew must build a dance board to allow the camera car to move freely. This special dance board is made of high-quality plywood or birch boards, up to three to four inches thick, covered with a layer of smooth masonite.

Most importantly, the joints had to be carefully aligned and taped to create the perfect surface on which the dolly would move smoothly.

In Murphy's view, a good camera car can move sideways or go anywhere, and the combination of various moves can be very complicated. The only certainty is that he should avoid shooting the dance board.

Smooth boards or dancing boards become critical when anything other than a wide angle lens is attached to the camera, as certain bumps in the floor will cause long shots to shake.

Therefore, Murphy will not use any long shots in such action scenes.

However, during the shooting, I still encountered some difficulties. Murphy found that motorcycles and stuntmen could use the inertia of turning to stick very close to the floor, and because of the position of the camera, it was difficult to perform at a horizontal angle at this time. shoot.

Standing on the set and watching for a while, Murphy quickly thought of a way to add an extension arm on the platform that could bear the weight of the Imax camera.

Murphy thought of two solutions. The other requires readjusting the mounting arm so that the camera can reach a height of only a few inches above the ground. However, the camera cart cannot be modified on site and needs to be returned to the factory for installation, which is quite troublesome.

It is relatively easy to add an extension arm. To put it bluntly, it is to add a high-strength alloy tube that can be lowered and extended to the camera cart, so that the lens of the Imax camera can be as close to the floor as possible.

Because of the addition of the extension arm, Murphy only filmed two scenes in the morning, but in the afternoon, the progress of the filming accelerated, and it took only three days to basically complete the filming here. The scenes here There were not many, and some of the plays had to go to New York for live shooting.

Subsequently, a group of main actors also joined the crew. 8 For more exciting novels, welcome to visit our Reading Academy