Shooting the impossible shot

The Challenge

Of all the things I’ve shot over the years, this is the one I get asked about the most so I’ve finally got around to creating a little breakdown.

Director James Lawes called me with this crazy but really exciting brief. It was a driving safety commercial for the Scottish Government, produced by Greenroom Films for The Leith Agency. He described the action of passing through a car crash to find the perpetrator and said he wanted it to look like one shot or a 'oner' as its come top be known. The camera was to fly though windscreens into a Birds Eye view, through a police car before settling on an ambulance. I said ‘sure’ and then I went and sat down in a dark room and tried to figure out how the hell we’d do it.

The tools for the job

This was before the invention of the umbilical cameras like the Venice and Ronin 4D, so the answer for us and I still can’t think of a better way we could have got through the tiny gaps, was to use a Ronin RS2 Pro in torch mode with an A7S 3 and Sony FE 24mm 1.4 on so we could shoot high ISO 12800 and have a light payload for the ronin. This went to a ninja for prores raw to reduce noise. The reason for wanting to shoot with a camera that was great in low light is as the budget was low, I know we couldn't afford a large overhead source, so I wanted to use practicals like headlights and emergency vehicle lights to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Also, the shot was alsmost 360 so there wasn't a lot of places to hide a crane. 

The Ronin was then attached to a Technocrane 22 which is really designed for studio use so has less outdoor protection making it much slimmer and ideal for us to squeeze through the gaps. I then operated the camera head using the Force Motion on the phone, mounted to a Tripod as we found it to be better than the actual dedicated unit?! Go figure. We tested this in the car park to make sure everything worked well

Once we had the brief we planned the action, where we were going to put in the hidden cuts (3 in total) and then adapted this to the dimensions of the technocrane. 

I then learnt enough of Cinema 4D to make a very crude animatic so that we could work out timings and whether certain moves were even possible. This is how it looked:

The big problem was the base unit below the techno was too tall to allow us to extract the camera through the cars. So the amazing guys at Cineworks had the base modified and re machined it. They basically had a large section taken out of it so that the arm could slide through both passenger windows of a car and also through a smashed windscreen. 

They had a metal bracket made to attach the ronin to it in both torch mode and underslung which we used for the first shot as the camera needed to be inverted upside down before heading straight up. Once we had the measurements, our Art dept went on a massive search for the few vehicles that would work and somehow delivered what we needed. Even with all the calculations we still had to angle grind the last few millimetres out of the car and I think we did 20 plus takes to get it through at the right speed.

And here is the final film with the behind the scenes to show how the camera moved through the scene:

In total we only had 5 HOURS to shoot this whole thing as we had a road blockage put in for us that had limited time as we were working though the night. That added a lot of extra pressure but with this shoot, if we didn't get one shot, we didn't get the whole thing as they all had to fit together. I thought the most difficult shot would be the one tracking back from the sunroof and through the windscreen but in actual fact, the one we struggled most with was the final one through the police car as the windows were tighter than we had previously thought and the cables of the techno kept getting caught. We were under pressure as time was running out and it was a good lesson in taking a moment to figure out a problem rather than keep trying it in hope it will work! The film has been nominated for a number of awards and more than anything, I really hope it’s saves some lives too!