Paul Jeffrey
Premium
RaceDepartment regular Stig Bidstrup recently reached out to me to discuss a new short car chase film he and a several other HistorX members created using the rFactor 2 racing simulator. Stig proceeded to send over a link to the film and I'm sure you will agree it makes for an enjoyable 7 + minutes viewing!
I had every intention of writing up a little article on this and putting together some words to describe this awesome video but who better than one of the original members of the team to describe what goes into making a mini movie in rFactor 2.
Over to Stig to pick up the story:
"Mad longford started as a desire to make a car chase video. I race in the HistorX Club here at RD on a weekly basis, and I have had many close race fights with another regular Jarek Kostowski. I have mentioned to him more than once, that I would like to make this car chase video with him, that should be more like a Movie. He gave the thumps up, so the thinking process began back in February. I have always liked the opening scene from the first Mad Max movie, where Max drives chicken with the night rider, so I decided to build the movie up around that scene.
rFactor 2 was chosen in the end to be the platform, since many of us from the HistorX Club now owned the game, and we had the possibility to combine several road going car types in that game. But we needed a cool looking high performance road car. In April I started asking around in the forum and got in touch with Gijs van Elderen, who was so kind to make the missing link- the Camaro Street.
In May we got a team assembled: Jarek Kostowski,Hans Sneep,Denis Betty,Stig Bidstrup, and one more who never made it because of real life duties.
The Location needed to be as close to public roads as possible, and with the nice graphics the track has, choosing Longford 67 was not difficult. But it came clear that we needed a bit more space for a spectacular ending, so the idea was to find a straight, that could look like an extension of the main straight on Longford. The Route 666 main straight became the winner.
To give the audience a clue to what's going on in the movie, I came up with the idea, that the Boxmaster has a police radio installed, and gets unwillingly involved in the action. The radio chatter I found on the mighty youtube. It`s recorded in Western Australia, and it has that scratchy sound, and a woman at headquarters that says: "copy!". When I heard that I was one happy puppy!!
Working on the scenes started in mid May. We used 4 days spread out on 2 weeks, 3-4 hours each time. The team got drawings over each scene ( 10 in total ), so they knew what to do, and off course we were on TS, so we could coordinate. Some of the exciting things to work with, was the ATV moving camera and sound. Scene 1 for excample where Denis drives the ATV in the field and captures the action as a moving drive by camera - it has a little shaking that adds to the immersion of high speed.
There were a few challenges. One was to get the Camaro to slide. Due to the high grip nature of the car (GT3) it was close to driving Jarek crazy - normally he can slide anything and hold it. The solution ended up being - rain tyres. Then it could be drifted reasonably. Another challenge was scene 3, where I wanted a handbrake turn in front of the police cars - there is no handbrake on the Camaro! After some testing, the solution was to use the H shifter. Go from second gear directly to reverse and floor the throttle. Use auto clutch or the engine will die 8 out of 10 times..HistorX drivers do not in general use any assists of any sort, so getting Jarek to use auto clutch, did take some persuasion on TS. The 2 biggest heroes in that scene is Hans and Denis. They were placed in the 2 police cars for about 80 minutes, just waiting for us to make it right
The only one-take scene in the movie is scene 6, where the police hero car is getting ready to meet the on coming Camaro. Denis is driving the police car out on the road, Hans is filming from behind, and I am planted on the road to capture the take off. I say to Denis on TS: "I want tyre smoke and black rubber printed in the asphalt." He revs up and takes off like a bat out of hell! I get speechless for about 5 sec - Jarek is resting in the pit and says: "wooow!". I then recover, and assure Denis we don't need to use more time on this scene.
The ending scene turned out to be one of the most difficult scenes to make. I wanted a bang and some fire, but its quite difficult to make the rF2 cars catch fire, so in the scene where I hit the Camaro perfectly from behind and the Camaro hits the Boxmaster, it is a separate recording from where the camaro is on fire in slow-motion - that part was recorded 3 days earlier, when Hans, Denis and I did some fire test runs. The police car was also in the shunt, so I had to be creative with the camera movement to keep the police car out of the picture. When I added the slowmo it looked perfect!
And if you want to know who never made it to the set - look in the end credits, where he has a fictional function as a little "gimmick"."
Watch the full Mad Longford movie here on the RaceDepartment RaceTube:
Credits:
- Jarek Kostowski : Camaro driver 95 % of the time
- Hans Sneep : Boxmaster driver and camera and sound catcher from ATV. Many of the scenes are filmed outside of the default TV camera area and ATV were utilised to capture the best audio and visual experience.
- Denis Betty : Police driver in some of the scenes. ATV driver in scene 2 and Camera and sound from ATV like Hans.
- Stig Bidstrup : Director in charge of the operation. Scene creation and vehicle allocation. Drives Police car and Camaro in 2 scenes. ATV driver when the cars Jump at Route 666 and server host.
- Jeff Laceski : is on the team but didn't have time to take part, so as a gimmick he is mentioned as Catering and Mechanic in the end titles
- Gijs van Elderen : Camaro street car creator. Download link on the rFactor 2 Mods page here.
Want to do some racing with the team behind Mad Longford? Have a look at our HistorX rFactor 1 Racing Club right here on RD! Old cars and fast tracks without the gimmicks of modern race machines... what's not to love?
What did you think of the Mad Longford rF2 movie? Enjoy the work of these talented guys? Got something similar you want to share with your fellow RD readers? Let us know in the comments section below!
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