Making Motion with the 'Poor Man's Process'

Setting up moonlight for our hero car on "Boxed In"

Special effects come in all shapes and sizes. The Wizard of Oz used special paint to transition Dorothy from sepia Kansas into the colorful land of Oz. Star Wars pioneered countless types of effects like model spaceships blowing up and firing lasers. Matte paintings have been around almost since the very beginning of the medium and can enhance film sets that may only be half built during production.

But one type of special effect continues to challenge filmmakers of all experience levels ever since it was first seen in "The Story of the Kelly Gang" way back in 1906. You've seen it dozens of times in films, sometimes you don't realize you're seeing it, and sometimes it's painfully obvious and wildly distracting.

Q Branch sure has come a long way, eh Jimmy

This is car process film making! And if you are making a film on a shoestring budget, you'll be referring to this as the 'Poor Man's Process' (PMP). This film making effect is intended to create the illusion that you're shooting characters behind the wheel of a real moving car, despite the fact that in reality, your vehicle and actors are parked in a safe secluded space. Far away from inconvenient obstacles like traffic, pedestrians, buildings, sunshine, wind, and mother nature herself.

Think of a driving scene from one of your favorite films, one that takes place at night. Visually, what happens in it? Are there headlights of other cars visible in the background? Are there streetlights washing over the actor's faces occasionally? Is there weather coming down on the windshield? Is there a glow coming from the car radio area or the speedometer? What does the world look like outside of the windows - do buildings or forests fly by ? Or is the outside world a black void?

Black Void option:

Buddy's friend drinkin' because it's the 1950's and who cares

Streetlight option:

No second date, Johnny.

Our PMP took inspiration from movies like "Christine" (1983) and leaned into a very black world outside of the vehicle. True this is the more economical option , but it was the right choice for our film's plot because the road our characters drove on had no traffic in sight, had no street lights, and had no other lit buildings to drive past.

These story limitations gave us fewer lighting effects (called 'gags' on a PMP set) to deploy for our scene, which was a small bummer because I was excited to build an overhead rig that would pass lights over the windshield to mimic passing street lights. So with no passing cars, no passing streetlights, no passing lit buildings, we chose three options to light the scene.

We utilized a moon light, a car radio LED light, and the car's tail lights. We shot an Arri LC7 into an ultrabounce angled about 75* toward the car, and this was most of our moon. On the opposite side of the car, a diffused tube light shone down on the passenger side. To create the movement, we had a crew member wave brute flags and even our sound girl's boom pole in front of the tube light, casting shadows in a rhythmic way. For the moon, I came up with a spinning wheel gag with real tree branches positioned outwards. The wheel was fixed to a baby spud plate, then inserted loosely into a kino flow offset arm!

Here is Ari a week before the shoot, where we tested a mark i version of the "tree branch wheel". Don't make fun of my bedsheet/ cloroplast bounce!

For our car radio light, we used the good ol' Aputure MC dialed to mimic the green glow of the radio's clock. I loved the sickly green/yellow color it created for our actors on the day. When it was combined with the red glow of the tail lights behind the car (achieved with two basic RGB lights bought on Amazon), we had a really cool and colorful composition to work within.

screenshot from our script/continuity's ipad taken while making final tweaks

Another ipad screenshot, this time we pumped up the tail lights when the driver had the vehicle in park.

It was important to only use the red tail lights gently while the car was supposed to be in motion, and then make it noticeably brighter after our driver "slams on the brakes" when the characters' argument concludes. For a little extra immersion when the car was abruptly stopped, we had a smoke machine spritz just a small puff, to simulate the dust of the gravel road getting kicked up. We had a nice insert shot of the car's clock displaying a critical time of day , suddenly getting splashed with the red tail light at a key moment. I think that will play nicely in the edit.

So this is what we did with our Sunday at CSIF. Our director Laila Blue was awesome to work with - she had a clear vision of how she wanted the characters conveyed and had trust in me and the team to pull off these strange lighting gags. In the future I'd love to experiment with rear projection for car driving scenes.

Let me leave you now with an awesome Saul Goodman moment from the beloved series "Breaking Bad", which has a tremendous PMP shot that is wholly and utterly... unconvincing, and yet so very perfect for the context of the scene.