Posted by nobody special on 07/08/06 05:56

Yeah, it's been done before, one of the things to watch out for is the
added mass of even a handycam makes the truck top-heavy and liable to
roll over on any sharp turns or bumps. The rigs i've seen use a
wireless POV camera to keep things smaller, lighter, and easier. You
find that even with an expensive RC truck, one with very good
suspension and soft tires, you get a lot more bumps in the view than
you expected, and framing the shots in motion, remotely, requires more
than casual RC driving skills. Frankly, I don't think it's worth it,
and a better plan might be a POV camera on a stick or wand, carried
alongside by a second skater or someone on a bike.

Or, you could do the effect that's popular for a lot of car
commercials. You mount a POV camera on a (VERY!) stiff rod thats
tightly bound to the board itself and hangs out front to one side or
the other a couple feet, like a lance. This welds the POV lens and
board/rider into one inertial frame that doesn't appear to move,
instead, the world and road around it seems to move and a "magic"
camera seems to float along in perfect formation with the
car/skateboard, as if it was a motion-control rig.

In the edit, you just use compositing software with a painting system
to paint out the rig that's in the shot, replacing it with adjacent
pixels from the scene. Same as in a still with photoshop you can hide
wires using the clone brush. Only it's more work on video because you
have to paint each frame.

But it looks unearthly cool. Kind of "matrix'-like

One of the places you can see this effect, and one of the first places
I saw it, was at the BMW Films site where they have famous directors
make adventure shorts that star the cars driven by Clive Owen as "the
Driver". They are mini-movie commercials. The one you should see
relevant to this post is directed by the late great John Frankenheimer.
You should watch it twice, once without the director's comments torun
on, once with. But you'll see this effect int he chase sequence.

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