before we had this on Mythbusters our our camera car was a minivan that I
would just be hanging out the back of with the camera my shoulder you know
with one hand on the on the van so I didn't fall out this is much nicer
everybody its Jamie one of the things that surprised us when we started
shooting the show was that the crew who have watched us build all sorts of
things over the years have often acquired a taste for doing
that themselves and one in particular Scott Sorenson decided to build himself
a camera control rig to mount on a chase car which incidentally was a leftover
cop car from water or experiments and so I am bimbe helped him design this rig
and mount it to his car it works really well we're about to demo it hey Scott
hey norm how's it going good good good to see you thanks for having us out here
so this is it this is your chase car yeah this is it this is kind of it's
like a Mythbusters version of a chase car anyway so what is a chase car for
people out there who don't know is well should be a vehicle that you can film
out of it's a filming platform so you could film like car to car or get some
nice tracking shots nice and stable and remote and some of those spectacular
shots people out there may have seen it on Mythbusters in the final season yeah
the the final episode actually we got to use this car to kind of document the
disruption on the run away by the wall shot I love for you
to help me walk through exactly how that shot was captured well so this camera
here this is the Blackmagic Ursa 4.6 k and it's it's a beautiful little camera
and I see it mounted to the DJI Ronin that's familiar it's a three axis
stabilizing gimbal that you have remote control on ya and you get monitor and
video out but that's all the equipment I recognize everything from here it looks
specialized yeah what is the road in itself attached to okay so the Ronin is
itself is attached to this vibration plate which helps absorb some of the
bumps and shock as you're driving down the road and then that is mounted to
this sled which I kind of code designed with one of the engineers at bimbo OH
so this goes up and down on this track and it's controlled by this bimba air
piston here air powered it's an all air pad all compressed air yeah and so this
sled here it's like a vertical dolly you can have what about 8 feet of movement
about 8 feet yeah this is a it's essentially like a forklift I like it
because I'm not worried from driving down the road I'm not gonna like hit it
on anything like if you have like a big arm car which are very standard in
Hollywood you know you need a big crew for that because you don't like swing
the arm out and hit a lamp or something it's kind of dangerous this is much more
like user friendly alright and all that is mounted to the car yeah so just a
standard tow hitch to mount it on the back of the car okay and then you have
some stabilization up there what's in the trunk well so we've got a big beefy
air compressor it's got a 10 gallon air tank which is feeding air into this
bimba air controller which is giving me these two lines which in turn run the
piston and that gives you with that controller pretty precise control very
precise control good enough for filming shots and get a smooth shot I can move
it as fast and up and down yeah I want and plenty of air to run oh yeah yeah
it's you know we've been on the last episode we were using this pretty
consistently and air compressor kicks on when the
little low
all right so let me show you how we control the lift so your front passenger
has all control for the camera right here I've got the control for the air
system this controls all the up-and-down movement so if we just roll onto it like
a gas pedal here you can hear the air feeding into the system then the camera
lifts up and they can watch all that on a monitor yeah yeah cool computer
monitor there yeah so we've got a little TV here so I've got an SDI feed into my
center console where I have a Blackmagic 4k SDI to HDMI converter running this
monitor here and then that 3 axis gimbal the Ronin yeah controlled with so Weiner
yeah so we've got the Ronin control here so I've got full pan and tilt and roll
control so you've got one Operator controlling the whole thing Scott this
is an amazing project I love to get a demo can we shoot with this today yeah
definitely here hop in why don't you operate the
camera and I'll Drive Wow yeah it's a command center yeah it's you know I've
got the the cop console here we kind of very little bit because we're in a cop
car yeah yeah this is a this is a cop car
Mythbusters actually bought this car from a police auction to use on an
episode so clearly a two-person operation that
was the goal with the whole project is normally these kinds of things are six
man crew board of different cameras you use well so for the final episode of
mythbusters' we were using the sony fs7 hundred and I had that running from the
lift back to I had the odyssey 7q here and I was recording continuous high
speed 200 frames a second the entire run it's probably it's the longest
high-speed shot I've ever have ever done incredible yeah I mean right now it's
almost like the most advanced backup cam in the world right now
PS well we have another one of your friends from the Mythbusters production
crew here to help us give a demo I'd love to be able to shoot a piece of
action yeah let's do it
hey well well thanks for coming out so I was thinking what we do is start nice
and close like this with the camera really low so right now if you look at
the shot it's like real big and fat on this tire in the back and then we'll
have we'll got the same speed and we'll give them the signal and we're gonna
pull away and as we pull away you can lift up lift up and then we will come up
the side and turn turn a fall them a little bit yeah so when you guys are
planning a shot for Mythbusters you do it like a more detailed version of this
or you block out every single shot it's
yeah maybe no it's about as detailed as we get yeah
all right I mean normally it's more cameras than just the one if we were
doing this for Mythbusters we'd probably have about you know a few GoPros on
we'll hear and then that might be you know we'd have this going then a couple
cameras like staged around to get everything all in the one take I think I
got this rough in my head let's get in the car and hopefully get the shot
they're right it's gonna friend him I would put hemline right here
a little bit of a dip here that's nice low car for
parking lots and I pan a little to the right
and go ahead and go up
Scot that was awesome hey nice shot man wow it was so much fun
and it totally gives me a whole new appreciation for the work you guys do
and have done on the show an incredible rig what are your plans for next I don't
know to be determined with Mythbusters done we'll see how we can how we can use
it now you have the opportunity to experiment with some some gear but
something directly from the show Scott thank you so much
norm right action there and we'll have more stuff untested next time see it