How Hollywood rigs up cameras in cars

[Vortex Radar]

Lately I've been thinking about mounting a mirrorless cam up to my windshield to do a comparison with a dashcam and a higher end camera with a better sensor, lens, etc. I hopped onto YouTube to get some tips on how to rig up a camera and found some awesome videos. This stuff is fascinating and it's taking stuff to the next level compared to what we do here.

Starting simple, here's a video showing how you rig up a bigger camera to a windshield.

Then going further down the rabbit hole, here's how they do it in movies including camera mounts, external lights, reflectors, added safety gear, padding on the vehicles for the mounts, entire film crews, etc. This is kinda blowing my mind right now compared to sticking a GoPro onto the WS with a single suction cup to make a YouTube video, lol.

 

[Dashmellow]

These are fascinating videos Vortex Radar but why call them "dash cams". This is cinematography. Maybe if they pointed the camera out the window?

I've been on a few major movie sets and have been involved with shooting TV commercials going back to when I was a teenager and worked as a production assistant for a NYC advertising agency. It is amazing to witness what goes into this process. What grips do on a movie set like we see in these videos has largely remained the same since the early days of movie making but what really amazes me is how computers, technology and new equipment designs have completely altered the landscape of how films are created in the 21st century.

 

[Vortex Radar]

lol fair point, this is far beyond what we'd consider a dashcam, plus the cameras are pointed at people, not the road ahead. Either way this stuff is a treat to see! I didn't realize how much goes into creating the shots we see on screen...

 

[Dashmellow]

It is remarkable how complex some film making can be these days, especially in the hands of a skilled director.

The other aspect is what is done with computers now. When I was a younger man everything you would see on film was done in camera, one way or another. When we needed some kind of special effect for a TV commercial, even a simple one, we would go to what was called an "Optical House" where they came up with all kinds of magic tricks to make things happen, often using what was called an Optical Printer. Sometimes things were done directly in the camera when filming. I recall an amazing title sequence they did for us where a whirlwind of spinning color suddenly materialized into the opening title. It was nothing more than the artwork filmed on a turntable running at different speeds and spliced togerther in a unique way.

If you have ever seen Stanley Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey, you can see some amazing examples of this kind of thing as the entire film was made optically since there was no CGI back in 1968.

There is a famous scene in 2001 where a stewardess on a space liner enters the passenger compartment to find that a sleeping passenger's pen had floated out of his pocket in zero gravity, so she plucks it out of the air and puts it back in his pocket. Today that would be trivial to create on a computer but back then they shot the scene through a rotating sheet of glass with the pen attached with (newly invented) double sided tape. Of course, the space plane and planet earth were models shot in a studio. The whole thing still looks seamless to this day.

 

[rcg530]

The gear mounted in a car to record video/audio for a tv show/movie/commercial can consume a large amount of space. For the average driver, there's no way any of those larger configurations would be "legal" based on restrictions in the various vehicle codes when it comes to not blocking the driver's line of sight or the restricted locations on a windshield a device can be attached. I struggle with the space and line of sight issue placing the much smaller dash cameras and their cables in my car for my dash camera testing.

 

[Panzer Platform]

Starting simple, here's a video showing how you rig up a bigger camera to a windshield.

I think I see where you’re going with this.
I’ve been riding motorcycles since 1993.
Around 2015 I saw the booming YouTube trend of filming motorcycle riding, and moto vlogging.
I bought my first action cam and started experimenting by mounting it in various locations to get “exciting” POV shots.
Suction cups don’t work on motorcycles, so I had to make my own custom mounting brackets by bending some metal bars I found at my local hardware store.
And that’s when I fell in love with “vehicular cameras”.
Here’s a clip from my first failed YouTube channel;

 

[Vortex Radar]

Thank you for those clips @Dashmellow! Awesome to see how they achieved that floating pen shot.

Speaking of a rotating sheet of glass, that reminds me of a trick I've seen still photographers use to shoot long exposures of waterfalls. Let's say you wanted to achieve a shot like this with the camera at the base of a waterfall with the shutter exposing for hours on end.



Well one of the difficulties of doing a shot like this is keeping the front lens element clean and free of droplets given that waterfalls tend to shoot up a spray of water when you're close to the base.



To work around this, one technique I've seen used is to put a spinning piece of glass directly in front of the lens. The idea is that any droplets from the waterfall spray will hit that protective sheet of glass and then will get flung off the side thanks to centripetal force, keeping the lens itself clean and free of droplets that would interfere with capturing the image.

 

[Vortex Radar]

The gear mounted in a car to record video/audio for a tv show/movie/commercial can consume a large amount of space. For the average driver, there's no way any of those larger configurations would be "legal" based on restrictions in the various vehicle codes when it comes to not blocking the driver's line of sight or the restricted locations on a windshield a device can be attached. I struggle with the space and line of sight issue placing the much smaller dash cameras and their cables in my car for my dash camera testing.

lol yeah, part of where I was initially thinking of going with this is addressing the complaint that people bring up with dashcams using lower end and cheap hardware and for fun I could try rigging up a higher end camera to the windshield to show what could be possible if you use bigger cameras with larger sensors and bigger pixels, larger wide aperture lenses, etc. Mounting the camera in the first place is tricky and has some obvious safety and visibility issues as well.