Last week of July 2020 was filled with fast cars, burned rubber, and the summer heat of scorching Las Vegas sun.
We were at the Exotic Racing Las Vegas, https://exoticsracing.com/, a place where you can take some of the hottest cars on the market today for a spin around a race track.
It was truly amazing and the amount of people that come out even on a Monday / Tuesday that were were there was kinda crazy , and according to them it was still pretty slow.
However, what we were doing there was trying to settle a simple question:
Which one was faster / better and why: Porsche or Ferrari.
In the Green corner, representing Porsche was the GT3RS in a toxic green and in the Red corner, of course, was the Ferrari 488 Pista.
Now all this was for an episode of AutoBiography Season 2 for Motor Trend, which you might have heard of by now, but for those who haven't it's a network / channel dedicated to cars and all things car related. Which was super cool.
Our job was to get enough footage / material to piece everything together in post, make it interesting and engaging.
I was mainly focusing on shooting, i.e. operating the camera.
Now for some of the shots we tend to use specialty equipment, which if you are not in the industry you may have never seen, but it's cool.
Filming fast cars around the track we used Flowcine Black Arm [ right] and Tilta Hydra. [ left]
Now the way this works is we come out, build all these rigs out, make sure everything is balanced and not gonna fall off (we are carrying expensive payloads after all), then we get into the car and use controllers or remotes to operate these contraptions.
Of course just as with anything, and when you are running out of time, things get finniky and not always work as they should so we have to troubleshoot quickly and find solutions otherwise we are taking the risk of scrapping the take. We are on the clock after all.
There is nothing like filming super cars, going round the track and seeing how things will come out for the first time. You get a real sense of motion, of feelings and get an appreciation for certain angles and shots.
I strongly believe you should enjoy what you do otherwise you need to make the tough decision and move onto something else.
The rest of the shoot, after we were done w/ car chase scenes was used to get b-roll, interviews, pick up shots, aerials, etc and for those, in order to get clean, smooth footage we tend to use DJI Ronins which are gimballs on which you toss a camera, they are stabilizers.
Those do tend to work pretty well, of course if and when everything is balanced correctly. However those are technical things in nature and the only thing that the audience will ever pay attention to are the shots, the creativity, the story telling and how engaging the piece is.
There is more car related stuff coming up, however it's a wrap for the time being. We had a great time, even thought the heat and the constant changing weather was throwing us curve balls but think we got everything done despite that regardless and had a great time doing that.
Think the episode will look great. If you guys wanna shoot something just drop us a line at Art@C137prod.com or text to 702 980 9620., always looking forward to hearing from you.
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