How to DRIVE A MODEL CAR using VFX!

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Steve Ramsden here with DIY Moviemaking and this week I’m going to show to you how to use VFX to drive a model car!
The easiest way to make a model car look full size is to put it close to the camera and line it up with your background. This is an old Hollywood trick called ‘forced perspective’ - it’s all done in-camera and requires no editing or compositing at all. And I’ve made a separate video on how you can do this effect yourself.
But of course this normally limits your car to staying still, and you can’t interact with it very much apart from walking behind it. So if you fancy a more advanced method, today we’re going to do some VFX compositing to make it look like I am actually driving this model car along a road!
Just like when doing this effect totally in-camera, when choosing a model car to use the bigger the better, as we’re going to need to get our camera really close to the model. the scale of 1:18 gives a lot more detail than smaller models, and this effect will still probably not look 100% realistic unless you have an enormous model - in which case you might as well use a real car! And so I would really suggest this as being more of just a fun experiment. I’m going to be using this model of a 1964 Aston Martin DB5, which is the famous car used by James Bond, first seen in with Sean Connery in “Goldfinger”.
So for this experiment you will need to get three shots - the background, the car, and the driver, and I would shoot them in that order. To get your background shot, you can get someone to drive you along a section on road I film out the window. I did this with a gimbal to keep the shot steady, and you could also do this with a phone or an action camera.
Next you need to film the model car, and for this we used a green screen. Now the reason I suggest getting the background first is you now know where the sun and the shadows are, so you can try and match them when filming your model. I set this up with a bright light coming from behind and off to the left side to look like the sun, and I had a polystyrene bounce board on the other side to reflect a bit of this light back. You will also want to film in ‘deep focus’ meaning you’re trying to get as much of your model in focus at the same time, otherwise it will look tiny. This means you’ll need to change your aperture to the highest f-number you can see displayed.
So that just leaves our shot of the driver. For this I took the model away, sat in front of the green screen on an apple box, and adjusted the lighting with a shadow over me to look like I was under the roof. Then I just tried to judge the angle, the height and the camera distance so that it would be a pretty good match for what the model looked like! This is pretty tricky and you’ll probably need a few tries at this, but with a bit of trial and error I was able to get something that I thought would work pretty well.
And then that was everything filmed and it was time to try and put it together using Adobe After Effects!
The first thing to do is to import your 3 clips onto After Effects, and then put them onto a timeline with the background layer at the bottom, then the car layer, and then the driver layer. Start by switching off the driver layer. Next you can select the car layer and use the Keylight effect to remove the green screen. Select the green colour to remove, change the view to Screen Matte, adjust the values under the Clip Black and White settings until it’s a pretty good key, and then switch back to Intermediate Result or Final Result to see how it looks.
Next you can switch back on your driver layer, add Keylight once again and remove the background. Now you need to line this up with the car, and scale it so the driver appears the correct size.
And if you want to learn how to make the best film you can right now, then you will love my free webinar where I revel my top ten tips for making your passion project on a budget. I’ve put this free list together to give you some filmmaking inspiration no matter what level you are at. There’s tips on everything from scriptwriting a good idea, to preproduction and planning, to running your actual shoot where I share tips from real recent short films that I have directed, and then all the way through to post production. So click the link below to save your spot on the free webinar and I will see you inside. Happy moviemaking and I’ll see you next time!
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