THE TRUTH BEHIND CARS IN EXPLOSIVE FILM AND TELEVISION CRASH SCENES
Have you ever wondered about the thousands if not millions of cars which gets smashed, crashed or burned in some of the actions movies? How they get that full on crash effects without that much damage to the set?
Now is your time to finally know the truth behind the cars in crash scenes. Narrator Abby Tang explores the work of JEM F/X, a special effects house in Southern California, in a very explosive piece for Movies Insider. JEM F/X specialise in strategically weakening cars for crash scenes in films and television.
“We visited JEM FX to find out how its team of effects wizards primes cars to get destroyed spectacularly on camera.”
Tang also describes how the team strategically scores different parts of the cars to create specific types of crash scenes. One car was then subjected to all sorts of abuse that comes with the job.
Taking a Buick LeSabre as our case study, JEM’s technicians showed us how they score a car’s roof pillars and replace its door hinges to set it up for optimal wreckage. Then we saw how the weakened car responded to various forms of destruction, from having a 3,000-pound weight dropped on its roof to getting its doors whacked off with a forklift.