Blackbird can mimic any car!
This wicked little electric beast looks like a ton of fun to drive, but it’s even more impressive than it looks. The Blackbird is a visual effects stand-in for car commercials and filmmaking.
Its width, wheelbase, suspension action and engine response can be tuned to match pretty much any car, and its onboard 360-degree cameras can be used to generate perfect reflections when the real car body is overlaid onto it in post production. Those car commercials that look too good to be true? They probably are, and this little beast might be the reality underneath the perfection.
The Blackbird is the invention of Visual Effects wizards from The Mill, and it’s an electric stand-in rig that means you can now film any car scene you like, without the car.
It works like this: first, you adjust the Blackbird to meet the physical dimensions of the car you’re going to be replacing it with. To that end, you can alter its wheelbase by up to 4 ft (1.2 m), and its width by up to 10 in (25 cm). The suspension is also finely adjustable to mimic pretty much any chassis you’d like to use. The power curve of the rig’s electric drive can also be tuned to match the target car, be it a rear wheel drive V8 or an all-wheel drive flat four.
Then, you put the right wheels and tires on, and go film. The Blackbird also carries an impressive camera rig of its own, which it uses to capture and 3D-map the environment it’s being driven in.
The car can be completely replaced with a photo-realistic model, including true to life reflections generated by what the rig’s own cameras picked up.
Why use a rig?
Firstly, car commercials are often shot before the cars have actually been manufactured. That means final details might not have been finalized, and the cars that go to market might not be the ones shot earlier in the process.
Secondly, car releases are often kept under extreme secrecy, with heavily disguised test mules out on the streets trying to conceal the final look of the vehicle. Shooting with a Blackbird gives keen-eyed auto paparazzi nothing but a set of rims to work with.
With a Blackbird setup it’s possible to film absolutely anywhere without having to transport the brand new vehicles.
And finally, the results are going to be cleaner. The shots look absolutely magic. Reflections can be fine-tuned to show the car at its best, with no camera crew or safety vehicles to be seen, and there’s never a mark or distraction to worry about.
So the next time you’re watching a TV commercial or movie scene with a car that looks too good to be true, maybe it is. And maybe under that perfect footage is this anonymous, black, electric Mad Max mobile.
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