filming a car chase scene like the one from Bullitt

[Dan Brockett]

Assuming your talking about driving a vehicle very fast on the edge of control, nearly causing and being involved in multiple collisions in an urban setting, I hope that you have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in your budget for the permits, stunt drivers, safety officers, police officers, fire crew, vehicle suport, insurance policy, stunt support crew, camera mounts, ability to pay off lots of business owners who will have to shut down their businesses, etc.

Could be done, but I don’t see how on an indie budget. You will probably have to consider a back lot or an unpopulated area and even then, you will need a lot of support crew and gear. All of this stuff is amazingly expensive to do, that’s why most indie films are of angst-driven 20 somethings talking in apartments, not of car chases. The closest I ever came to this was producing a two car collision scene for a television show. Not exactly a chase, just two cars careening down a road toward each other and the crash and an explosion. To do that :10 sequence on S16 at night cost the production about $250,000.00 and that was quite a few years ago. What you are proposing will cost many times that. Think about the scenery, in a chase, you have to see many different blocks of a location, you can’t keep driving past the same BG elements.

You may have to modify your script or get someone to write a big check to do it and do it well. What do you think all of the Brett Ratners of the world do to blow those $100,000,000.00 plus budgets? Car chases can eat up a good portion.

Best,

Dan

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Tommy Hill]

You might want to check out http://www.videomaker.com and search for “dynamic car chase”. There is a tutorial on a high speed car chase filmed at low speed. It contains more than 40 clips that you can edit into a chase scene. It is a cool idea. We are using it in film production class at Baton Rouge Community College. It is not bullet, but it can be done on a shoe string budget. If you study the clips you will be able to do something similar for your chase. SHOOT GOOD STUFF

[Clint Nitkiewicz hernandez]

What I recommend is instead of thinking how expensive and how crazy and ridiculous it may be, just start by storyboarding it, forget costs and all that other crap, if you realize it’s too expensive, look into cgi. Haven’t you seen Fast and the Furious Tokyo Drift! Ha, jk. I havent, but heard there is a lot of cgi cars. Well, gone in 60 seconds was a great chase film, but not as good as Ronin in my view, or the Italian Job for that matter. Just storyboard it, don’t let costs or permit stuff scare you away from your ideas, don’t let the system change your art, change the system with your art.

Clint Nitkiewicz Hernandez
http://www.newelementproductions.com
Film-Maker/ Blu-ray Author/ Compositor

[Scott Stoneback]

Regardless of your ability to finance it…. watch Bullit and you will see a few funny things. One, they re-use some shots. Two, they cheated a few shots. Three, one second they are in SF and the next shot they are up on San Bruno mountain. Still, it was a great f-in chase. McQueen kicked butt.

But, Ronin was a better chase scene.

[Phillip Ashbeck]

watch Super Troopers with directory commentary. im not kidding. they give out a huge piece of editing help for a car chase scene that may make the entire chase for you. i dont know for sure as i havent tried it myself yet