B Positive driving plates

Quite a few of my driving plate shots are done at nighttime using a RED Gemini on a Ronin 2 mounted to a Flowcine Black Arm. The Gemini has great low light for these situations where we can't light and the Sigma Cine 14mm is pretty fast for such a wide lens, coming in at a T2. We also use Zeiss Super Speeds, but they have pretty strong purple fringing wide open at T1.3 so I usually stop them down to T2 for a much cleaner image. In this one we filmed a police car picture vehicle, which is different, as normally we're trying to hide the police cars/bikes that escort us when filming on public roads.

A month later, in a change from our usual driving plate shots, it was requested that we shoot on a hard-mounted setup rather than the Ronin 2 on Black Arm that we normally use. Easy enough. We built out an extra wide high-hat base for stability and bagged and ratcheted it down in the back of a van. The angle was set and the camera car driver would determine the framing by maintaining speed, accelerating, or slowing. It's decidedly low tech, but got the job done. We were just getting car to car (or I guess "van to van" is more accurate) and then did some van drive-bys with the camera on sticks.

Like usual, shot on the RED Gemini with the Sigma Cine 14mm and Zeiss Super Speeds.

Pivoting plates

We shot a car stunt scene for the Fox television show Pivoting last year and the episode (episode 2) has aired, so I can finally share some behind the scenes with you. While we normally use a larger camera vehicle (you can see pictures in many of my past posts), this one required some precision driving as there was traffic and a car stunt, so we rigged up a Porsche with three Komodos, two on hard mounts with Zeiss CP2 25mm lenses and one on a Ronin 2 in the center with a Sigma Cine 14mm. Because there was a hard u-turn, which caused the Ronin to swing to the side, we had to be conscientious of our placement so we wouldn't crash the moving camera into the stationary one to the side.

The local PD closed down a few blocks of street for us and we had a stunt coordinator making sure all the picture vehicles were correctly timed. This was nice as it takes some of the load off of our driver, who typically coordinates directly with the PD for our smaller, non-stunt driven shoots. This is also one of the few times we shot with the main unit, as most of the time we are shooting completely separate from 1st unit.

The best part is that the main feature of the stunt (a car skidding to a stop as they cut it off during the u-turn) didn't even make the edit since it would have been visible out the side or rear windows, but they cut to a forward facing shot instead! Oh well. At least the background plates we shot got used for when they're talking inside the moving car.

Please excuse the mediocre quality of my screenshots, as I had to take them off my computer screen with my phone, so they aren't as high of quality as I usually get.

Hacks HBO Max additional driving plates

I found the other episode we shot driving plates for in episode 7. This was a nighttime shoot, so we used a different LUT and mounted the cameras at a normal height rather than the elevated height for the double decker bus shots. We also had one camera mounted on the front, facing forward and up to capture reflection plates for the windshield. These shots were a little more simple, as they were background plates for a car driving scene.

The road was pretty rough, as construction had just started and they were tearing up the road (as you can see from the traffic cones in my shot of the monitor), but production needed to comp in the background of them driving up to the wedding chapel. Thank goodness for post-stabilization!

Hacks HBO Max series plates

Earlier this year I went up to Las Vegas to shoot some driving plates for a show called Hacks. I had no idea what it was, but knew we had to rig the camera array 13' up in the air to match the second story of a double decker bus. We used a triple RED Gemini array, controlled through a router so we could roll and cut all 3 cameras at exactly the same time.

We did runs on both the Panavision lenses they shot the series on -to exactly match the optical characteristics- as well as 14mm Sigma Art Cine primes to give them larger field of view options. Better to give them both options and not need one than shoot one option and need the other that wasn't shot.

I was pretty surprised when a couple months later I saw ads for a new HBO Max show called Hacks. And dang it, it looked pretty funny. So these plates worked in episode 3 and, while I know they shot some of it practical, obviously plates were needed for other parts. Watching the show, since I knew plates were being used in the scene, I kept a close eye on stray hair strands, as that's usually the biggest way to notice VFX backgrounds. Whatever they did, they did nice work. There were a few instances where I think I can tell it's VFX backgrounds, but overall they did a really good job compositing everything together.

We shot plates for another scene as well, but I haven't seen them appear in the show yet. I'll keep an eye out for them and share once they're up. In the meantime, if you haven't see the series, I recommend it.

The Glamorous World of Driving Plates!

The past couple years I developed my skills shooting driving plates. While I had done them before, I started doing a lot of shoots for several of Chuck Lorre's Warner Bros. television shows (Bob Hearts Abishola, Young Sheldon, Mom) along with occasional episodes of other television shows. If you aren't familiar with what driving plates are, here's the lowdown.

Often, on television shows that have driving scenes, those scenes are shot in a car on a greenscreen stage. This keeps the actors safe and also allows for a controlled environment, since the car isn't actually moving on the road. But since they need to look like they're driving, background plates of the moving street needs to be composited in behind them. So what happens is we get the edit of the driving scenes and we match the camera height, angle, and replicate any driving "movement" (such as swerves, pulling up to a curb, etc) so that the background can be properly matched to what they shot on the greenscreen. This takes us from city streets and freeways to suburban neighborhoods, parking garages, and even the drive thru. Whatever the story calls for, we shoot.

For most of our shoots, we use Jack Carpenter of Carpenter Camera Cars and rig up a RED Gemini on a DJI Ronin 2 with a FlowCine Black Arm. The Ronin keeps the camera stable and level while the Black Arm absorbs the larger side to side and up and down movement. The RED Gemini, with its dual gain sensor, allows us to shoot night driving plates on darker streets while keeping the sensor noise under control.

There are many options for lens choices, as each production calls for different parameters. The majority of my shoots want to shoot wide plates that they can then zoom in on and shift around the frame, giving them a lot of placement flexibility in post. For this, we generally use the Sigma Cine 14mm T2. We run a matte box at all times, during the day to be able to add ND filtration and block out sun flares, and at night just to reduce flares from street lights (so no ND). When we're not doing Gemini on the Ronin, we tend to also shoot Arri Alexa hard mounted to the truck, oftentimes with 2-3 cameras simultaneously. Again, depends on what the client asks for.

So maybe the world of driving plates isn't that glamorous after all, but it's an interesting part of the filmmaking process, one that most people don't even think about. I'm glad I've been able to develop this skill and enjoy the process and the wind blowing through my hair as we drive down the road (well, maybe I enjoy it a little less during the winter night shoots...😉). But the team we've put together to shoot these is all great and I love working with them.