Narrator: In "The Batman," Viewers see
the first-ever electric Batmobile.
To get this blue fire look practically,
the team had to pivot to electric to avoid fires on set
and put a jet intake under its hood
to make it look like it was breathing.
This fits right in with the Batman franchise's
commitment to in-camera effects,
as the films have pulled off some of the Batmobile's
most impressive feats with minimal CGI.
Here's how six other memorable stunts came to life.
Christopher Nolan's version of the Batmobile,
the Tumbler, looks like a cross between a Hummer,
a tank, and a Lamborghini.
And because the director was set on capturing
the movie's police chase in camera,
this tanklike car had to be fast and maneuverable.
So the team constructed the Batmobile
with side-mounted wheels and no front axle,
which allowed it to pull off super-tight turns,
and designed its six wheels
to act independently of each other,
so that one could stop while the other rotated
to make the car change direction on a dime.
That meant this Batmobile could actually
execute those sharp moves you see in the movies.
It could also jump six feet in height
and 60 feet in distance
and really did run over the two cop cars in this shot,
a move the team practiced before the shoot.
Stunt driver George Cottle
trained for the police chase for months
by taking the Batmobile for laps on a closed racetrack.
When it came time to film in Chicago,
the stunt team tracked the Batmobile
with a device called the Ultimate Arm,
a high-speed, high-torque robotic camera crane
that could spin 360 degrees.
Attached to the top of a Mercedes,
this allowed them to get car-to-car tracking shots
at speeds of up to 90 miles per hour.
Despite the Tumbler's impressive specs,
there was one move it couldn't do.
Jump across the rooftops of Gotham.
He's flying on rooftops!
Narrator: So the crew decided
to do this stunt with miniatures,
1:3-scale models of the Gotham set and Batmobile.
The team replicated key details of the full-scale car
on the mini remote-controlled model
so that the two versions of the Batmobile
would drive as similarly as possible.
The model needed to drive at around 35 miles per hour,
which may not sound like much,
but is pretty fast for a miniature.
To match the background of the miniature footage
to the location in Chicago,
the crew extensively photographed
the entire shooting area and took detailed notes
on the location's lighting.
Tying it all together were the finishing touches
added digitally, including camera lens effects,
CG car headlights, moving reflections, vapor plumes,
and debris, like these shattering roof tiles you see
as the Batmobile sticks its landing.
After the location shoot in Chicago,
the team had to tackle another
seemingly impossible stunt for the very end of the chase,
when the Batmobile makes its dramatic return
through a waterfall at the mouth of the Batcave.
They shot the takeoff for real on a field,
but the landing was filmed on the Batcave set in the UK.
There, the team made a full-scale waterfall,
using 12 water pumps to run
14,000 gallons of water through the set.
Using huge high-pressure nitrogen cannons,
they catapulted the over-2½-ton Batmobile
through the waterfall sans driver.
This was risky, so they used a restraining cable
to stop the car right upon landing,
preventing it from hurtling through
the other end of the extremely expensive set.
When Christopher Nolan saw that the Batmobile
could jump up to 60 feet, he decided to take it
a step further in "The Dark Knight."
The movie's chase would involve the Batmobile
jumping over another car,
intercepting the Joker's grenade,
and then getting destroyed in a very spectacular way.
Since this would all take place in a tunnel,
stunt driver George Cottle
had to execute the jump perfectly.
Too much height, and he'd hit the concrete above.
The stunt team built a ramp
at just the right height and angle
that they could tow behind the other car
and created a big button
for Cottle to press inside the Batmobile,
so that he could trigger the explosion himself.
The key was timing it.
He had to wait until the car was at the top of its arc,
when he just began to feel it come down.
The car exploded from the back,
and to keep Cottle safe,
it had explosion-proof gas tanks
like the kind used on race cars
so that if the tanks got punctured,
they wouldn't actually explode.
The final installment of the Dark Knight trilogy
introduces the Batwing,
which serves as Batman's new ride
after a bunch of Tumblers
fall into the hands of Bane's henchmen.
This time around, the team had to make Batman's vehicle fly,
and because it's a Christopher Nolan movie,
they had to do it with as little CGI as possible.
The special effects team built two real versions of the Bat.
Both were massive, at 28 feet long and 17 feet wide.
There was a lighter version
that the team could lift up on cables,
which were removed in post to create the illusion of flight,
then there was a heavier version,
which weighed 1½ tons and had working guns
that fired via remote control.
The team mounted this Bat on a truck with a hydraulic crane
and drove it through the streets of Pittsburgh
at 50 miles an hour.
The VFX team removed the support car and crane in post.
While the Bat could be driven in a straight line
and could even swerve, it wasn't great
at going around corners at high speeds.
So for those shots where the Bat
did especially wild maneuvers,
the VFX team had to replace the practical Bat
with a digital replica.
Selling it wasn't easy.
Much of "The Dark Knight Rises"
takes place in the daytime --
unusual for a Batman movie.
That, coupled with the decision to shoot the film in Imax,
meant the level of detail on the CG Bat
had to stand up to a super-high resolution
under full lighting.
Luckily, the VFX artists
had the advantage of new technology:
a physically based ray-tracing system
partly developed at Pixar.
Ray tracing is a technique
of mapping out all the rays of light in a scene
as they bounce off different objects and characters.
Before, artists would've had to grade
the surface of the CG Bat by hand.
Now the software helped automate that process,
which made it easier to mimic the shadows
and highlights on every inch of the real thing.
Ben Affleck's 8,800-pound Batmobile
took over a year to build.
So how were they going to film shots like this?
The team created not one but three Batmobiles.
Well, sort of.
There was the real deal that Affleck drove,
with a full interior cockpit.
Then there were two proxy cars,
which they called "smashmobiles" --
basically stripped-down Dodge Ram duallies.
When any shots called for the Batmobile
to collide with other objects,
the filmmakers used one of the smashmobiles instead,
shooting on location in the streets of Detroit.
Actually doing the stunts with a stand-in car
gave the VFX artist a practical starting point,
so when the VFX team digitally swapped
the smashmobile for the Batmobile in post,
the action looked much more grounded.
It's that commitment to practical methods
that has brought this car to life again and again
and turned it into its very own character in the films.
So what do you think?
Does it come in black?