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[Suspense music]
[Cinecom's intro music]
Whenever you're watching an action film you see explosions,
car crashes, actors jumping off buildings.
And usually we think by ourselves: ‘wow, those are some cool visual effects’.
And although that is true, it are visual effects.
But there's usually a team of stunt people behind every action.
And these guys are kind of a world on its own.
[Music]
We drove to Action Planet, an event location based above Amsterdam
in the Netherlands.
Here we had a meet up with the Stunt Team the Beukelaar
and stunt department Belgium, lead by Marco Maas.
Now these guys are not the average stunt-men.
Nope, this team has worked in Les Miserables, Brimstone,
Mindhunters and more.
They have collected some of the best stuntmen in the world
and so, some of them even performed in The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy,
Inglorious Basterds, Dunkirk, Hitman’s Bodyguard, Wonder Woman, etcetera.
So it was a real honor for me to be invited.
They're planning to crash 4 cars today as part of a test.
We where the only camera crew there, which gave us a lot of flexibility.
And what they're installing right here is called a pipe-ramp.
But in order to make the car crash exactly the way they want,
precision is of the essence here.
-We started to replace the pipe ramp, so we can see if this is the right position.
There are a lot of elements, the position of the pipe ramp,
the speed that we can have and also what the car will do.
A small difference makes a big change in what the car is doing,
so that's a lot of thinking.
What we gotta do now, we replace the ramp,
we put the car also there and we drive one time.
Also we have some cones to have the perfect way,
so we can see easily what we will achieve.
-Filming a car crash is super important the way you do it.
If you film it wrong or using the wrong camera angles
you know that camera crash won’t look as powerful or even not really realistic.
We’ve been talking to Marco, he’s been giving up some great tips
and we came up with the following camera shots.
We got one camera sitting over there behind us.
The car is going to roll towards us.
We’re shooting that on a long tele lens so that we are super close on the car
when it's going to roll towards us.
Hopefully it's not going to roll too far,
because that’ll mean that we have to jump to the side,
but we're going to have a safety instructor with us while we're taking that shot.
Then over there we're going to have a side shot,
we’re going to shoot that on the RED Gemini,
so we can go with super slow motion with that camera
and just have like a tight medium shot of the car coming in from the side.
Then we got a third camera over there which is the Panasonic GH4,
and that is going to capture the car chasing super fast by the camera
and we're shooting that from a wide-angle lens,
it’s gonna be looking super cool.
And finally, we've got a little GoPro sitting right here on the ramp itself
and this camera right here is going to capture the car
as it's diving through the sky, which is going to look gorgeous.
And of course the last camera sits inside of the car itself.
We've noticed that shooting action scenes mostly comes down to a couple of things.
First of all, you have to make sure that you have enough camera angles
so that you can cut fast.
For a car crash that means setting up multiple cameras,
but when you're filming an actor running, for example,
you could do of course the exact same thing,
you take multiple shots.
We've also covered this in an earlier video
which I'll leave a link to in the description below.
The next thing is long lenses.
Stand far away and zoom in.
Doing so, you're going to compress your image,
focussing more on the action.
Your camera motion will also be more prominent
which sells the effect even more.
And the third one is depth.
You wanna emphasize the power of the crash or the action.
And a simple trick is to lay close to the ground
and use that ground as a foreground element.
The last crash that they did was a simple rollover.
Although it wasn't actually simple,
it just doesn't look as impressive as the pipe ramp.
But here it was super important that we laid the camera close to the ground.
-If you would advise us right now where to put the cameras now?
-Ideally I would advise you to use wide-angle lens,
low by the ground but in a crash cage
so we can crash the car over it.
So what I would suggest in an ideal world
it will come through here and then it will hit the ramp with the tires
steering and the car will roll over and end up somewhere in this area.
Oh, wait, they're still rehearsing.
So, it's not a big move compared to what you just saw with the pipe ramps
because pipe ramps requires a roll cage in the car
and this is like a low-speed turnover of the car
without a cage.
But, of course, then you have to bring the speed back.
-Of course.
-What’s interesting is to fly parallel with the drone.
In the right angle, I don't know what kind of lens
but you can have a look at it and drive parallel
and at the moment he goes over come a little bit to the outside.
Because when the car comes near it might hit your drone.
So that's interesting of course.
And then a little bit further away low by the ground
the camera.
-On a tele lens, maybe further away.
Okay, yeah, so it's kind of the same as with the previous
but now really low to the ground.
Yeah, okay.
Nicolas, we've just done several beautiful shots of the car flying through the air
and crashing into the floor.
But we still see that pipe frame over there,
how do you camouflage that or what do you do with that in post-production?
-Yeah, well we do nothing of course, we’re just doing the stunt,
but most of what’s happening it depends on the scene,
most of the time we do some road block signs
what we will cover it…
we have some forest pieces or grass or that kind of thing,
sometimes they put CGI, they just cut it away,
sometimes there's a car parked also that is blocked.
But road signs and road blocks kind of situation,
you see the a lot of times.
Since we were in a testing area it was hard to remove the pipe ramp
and the people around and everything.
We also found out that we need to know upfront which visuals
you’re gonna add in post.
If, for example you would add an explosion near the pipe ramp,
we should have already added a real explosion in there.
Even if that was just like an explosion of wind.
So, we focussed on something different.
The editing and the sound effects.
We were very lucky to have filmed 3 car crashes from various camera angles.
So I was able to pick out the best shots and still have plenty to work with.
I wanted to show every shot for only a few frames
and create a very fast paced edit, which turned out great.
And I remember one of the guys telling me that
Belgian productions usually don't have enough shots
because the budgets are much lower than in Hollywood.
And that's usually the problem here.
To make a car crash powerful, you need a lot of angles and a lot of shots.
Maybe an interesting idea: next time you see a car crash in a film,
just count the amount of shots that you see.
So then comes the sound design.
I used Storyblocks Audio to design the car crash sounds.
They’re also our sponsor for this episode,
but if they didn't I would still use their library.
Because it's really incredible.
For only a single price per year you can download unlimited music,
sound effects and loops.
I tried so many different sounds from their library,
when I thought that it didn't worked,
I could just go back and download a few other sounds effects.
It's really amazing, plus I also own the rights to use anything that I download
in commercial projects.
So I can highly recommend to check it out as well
by clicking that first link in the description below.
And now let’s have a look at our very first car crash scene ever.
-So, you're gonna be the first crasher, if I can say it like that,
is this standard procedure for you, or are you a little bit afraid?
-Not afraid.
Yes, it is standard procedure but we don't do this every week either,
and every crash is different, every car is different,
you never know what’s going to happen, yeah.
So, yeah you have to be focused, for sure.
I just really start focusing on the crash itself
and the drive and just that little part of the sequence,
so you can see there's a lot of people here, lots of stuff going on
and the closer we get to actually doing the crash
the more I let everything go and just start focusing,
making my world pretty small.
-How did you learn how to crash a car?
Honestly, crushing a car is not that hard,
it kinds of happens by itself,
but I did precision driving courses in the States,
do a lot of stunt driving, precision driving,
so that's the car control that counts.
So if you can control the car you know what its gonna do
and how you want to hit the ramp, so that's what's important.
-Right, awesome man, good luck I'd say.
-Thank you very much.
Stunts like these are super dangerous
and requires perfect mind and body training.
One does not simply become a stunt man.
So I invited Nicolas, one of the stunt coordinators, to chat some more.
-Nicolas, how do you become a stuntman?
-Well, that's a long story, you know.
-Can you keep it short?
-Yeah, of course, it’s funny because you say stuntman
and of course I'm a stuntman.
But nowadays we talk more about stunt performer
and the easy story from me is that I did an audition for Warner Brothers,
Police Academy Stunt Show,
and they asked me ‘hey, can you do stunts?’
and it was a no-go of course.
And because I'm a performer they said ‘no, no, you just do it,
because it's an audition.
So I did a stunt audition because the show is stunts and performing,
and of course I can drive a car very well, I have drove a motorcycle all my life,
I’m very sportive I can do a lot of sports,
so, you know, I can perform,
so I did the audition and then I got the job,
out of 4,000 people and they picked out 30 people.
And then I get trained three months for doing the show,
learn all the skills for a stunt show and that's how it became a stunt performer.
-If I wanted to become a stuntman, do you have tips for me?
-I have a lot of tips, of course, the thing is you need to work hard,
first of all the motivation, it must be a passion,
you must train be trained well,
you need to find people who can train you.
Nowadays you can watch YouTube films and it's not a joke,
in my time there's no YouTube.
Be in shape, your body and also your mind.
-Are there may be some kind of sports that are really important
for being a stuntman?
-Yes of course, stunt performers, you need to have skills,
nowadays you have a lot of parkour people.
-Oh yeah, of course, the free running stuff.
-And they’re very good, you see also in a lot of films,
also especially the Marvel films.
A lot of people also come from fighting sports.
You know, karate, kickboxing, Judo, Jiu-Jitsu,
so if you want to do driving stuff, do some driving training,
go to do a rally course or something.
-We’ve seen with the car crash that there was a safety team involved,
everything was coordinated very, very well.
It also felt really safe.
But I wonder, are stunts always super safe?
In stunts business we always talk about a calculated risk.
And that means we try to downgrade the risk,
we think ‘the car’s doing this’,
but sometimes a small change…
-There will always be a circumstance, like a small rock laying somewhere,
always be something.
-You know, that kind of thing.
so there's always kind of calculated risk
but most of the time we know about the calculated
so we think ‘okay, this is risk but we can handle the risk’.
-Did you ever actually got injured badly, or someone in your team
or someone that you know, a stuntman?
-Sometimes things happens, big things with our stunt team,
not big things happening, bruises of course, you know,
it's normal.
-It’s part of the job.
-It’s part of the job, sometimes maybe a broken wrist,
sometimes a broken leg also happening.
-Part of the job.
-One time I had a big explosion
and the explosion was really just a split second too early,
had some fire burn on my skin but not really a big thing.
There are people who died with stunts, famous, with skydiving,
you could die with that.
It happens also.
-I’m hearing so many great stories right now
I'm wondering, what was your most memorable stunt
that you've ever done?
-One time, a long time ago I did a bicycle jump,
I was chased by a police in Utrecht
and there was a tourist boat taking off
and I was jumping to the boat
and turned my bike and crashed onto the boat
and the smack, you know, it was like…
and all the power from speed it was just onto my body.
And of course I had protections,
but the weeks after my body was hurting because of the impact.
The impact was so hard.
And it was very funny, the director ‘very good, Nicolas…’
-‘Can we do it again’.
-Go do another one!
And I told him, ‘no, this just was one take’.
['The Blue Danube' waltz theme]
And that's what's being a stuntman is all about.
Just another casual job.
Thank you guys so much for watching,
thank you Storyblocks Audio for the support
and thank you Marco Maas for the invitation.
I hope that we can work more together in the future
because it was a really amazing day.
Thank you so much.
And as always:
Stay Creative!
Now let’s talk about the roads in the Netherlands,
they’re very smooth, but there are five rows currently
and the maximum speed is 100 Km.
Welcome to the Netherlands.
I’m stiff!
Did I say that in English?