One-take Car Chase

The 'Single-Take' car chase.

Operation Avalanche presented many unique challenges, one being a 3-minute, single-take car chase. We designed the sequence from 10 takes, which needed to be woven together seamlessly. Each take possessed uniquely valuable moment(s) which required assembly in a coherent manner.

When design began we decided the windshield shootout would serve as our chases mid-point. We were granted carte-blanche in figuring how our characters got to and from this point in time.. The first challenge was maintaining a viably consistent Pursuit Car distance across the many takes, all with wildly conflicting metrics. Often, the pursuit vehicle’s scale in-frame would dictate what take could follow.

After weeks of experimenting, we had 4 continuous minutes. Despite being visually appealing the sequence was dull, ill paced, and lacking the suspense audiences have come to expect from car chases. We locked our sequence and using compositing attempted to raise the stakes by adding car to car contact where there was none.

For the first contact I rotoscoped the pursuit car and animated it's impact quite crudely.

The Windshield, bullet mapping. Trajectory, element shoot, tracking.

Car crash.

Whip pan transitions and quantum leaps to remove 8 seconds.