Car Chase Scene

[Brotherming95 (Tony Cheuk)]

https://youtu.be/7XcxsIW-DG4

This is a chase scene from a short film I’m working on. It’s my first time doing a chase scene. Some context on my intentions.

The story is dialogue/character-driven, not action-driven, so I deliberately underplayed the chase. I used a plain, unremarkable car, pursuers in a soft-suspension American land-yacht (inspired by The Driver,1978), and static camera angles that don’t try to sell speed. This is intentional.

I location scouted real-life locations and used those as reference. The story takes place in a fictional Los Angeles, so I used residential areas from San Pedro as reference and looked at L.A. highways. The ending is near the San Pedro Postal Office close to Harbor Boulevard. The first shot I picked an on-ramp in Albuquerque, New Mexico as reference because I saw it in a film and I liked it.

My style can maybe be described as GTA San Andreas / Vice City-era “Plus”, not photorealism. This is consistent with earlier shorts I made in the same series so it’s not open for debate.

I am using Eevee. These shots have no compositor work done except glare.

So far, I am happy with the rough shape of the shots, but I feel like I want to go another stretch with it. It feels like I’m at 90% for where I want to be but unable to push it that bit extra. Visually it looks quite flat to me and not very cinematic, though I’m not sure if that’s only compositor-work and how I would achieve that. Now it looks like a videogame. Everything is sharp.

As for the visual detail, I don’t know how to put it into words, but it’s like the high level shapes are okay as well as the medium level details, but it’s still missing that low level detail to round it off.

Some things that crossed my mind: Exhaust fumes? Tire smoke? Ground fog? Horizon lights? Car paints? Lens flares? Road materials? Reflections? Skybox? More props? Or am I looking in the wrong places?

Thank you!

[etn249]

Welcome!

Good work on this render, you have a solid start!

I think the main issue might have something to do with an inconsistency in the level of detail. The cars, characters and lots of objects like street lights are relatively detailed. However, this clashes against the road and building textures which have a lower resolution (especially the building the car crashes into, you can really see how low detail it is). This could probably be improved by just adding a detail texture over what’s already there (either a noise texture or a tiling texture to add a bit of fine grain detail to big surfaces).

Also, lots of buildings look like they are just a cube with a texture and this seems a bit too low detail compared with the rest of the objects. Just extruding doors and windows in could help with little work needed.

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In some shots, the background seems a bit empty.

• This level of darkness would be realistic in the middle of nowhere, but if this is meant to be a city, I would expect some light pollution. You could decide to keep this on purpose though, if it helps convey the feeling you are going for.
• Some shots seem to have nothing outside to the road, no visible building or any object, just empty void. Or did you put some but they are completely unlit?
• We never see any moving car other than the ones involved in the chase. Maybe adding some other moving cars in the distance on the highway could help make the place look less abandoned? I don’t know the context of the story though, so that’s your call.

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The car crash at the end lacks impact, it just stops moving when it touches the building. I am assuming this is meant to be a crash, is it?

I would expect the car to visibly crumple into the wall, then bounce off. Maybe it would drift sideways a bit while impacting because of the sudden turn. The camera would shake. Maybe the windshield would crack and the headlights would break. The air bag would trigger.

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Were you planning on adding sound? If you were, I suggest adding at least some of the sound effects before judging the scene as having no impact. Sound will do a lot for this.

[revolt_randy]

I didn’t notice the texture/materials @etn249 mentioned, but their advice is always solid.

I don’t think things flowed very well in this. At about 40 seconds, the chase car appears to get left behind, but then it’s lights turn off. Next shot is of the chase car right behind the the target car. How did that happen?

The shoot out at the end is confusing. I see the car crash, I see someone stumble out of a car while being shot at. Then I see 2 people shooting, but they get shot. Who is shooting at who?

I think there needs to be a bit more story telling to the chase scene…

I love a good car chase and I think you’ve done a great job on this so far!

I want to see more!

Randy

[Brotherming95 (Tony Cheuk)]

Building detail: Fair point and that’s a quick-win! I’ll extrude window/door detail into the buildings. Shouldn’t be much work. I think I will redo the “gatehouse” in its entirety, as I agree this one is the most problematic as it’s not just background.

Background darkness/emptiness. This one was intentional, but I think I can push it further without breaking the look. The horizon “city” is actually just planes and icospheres with emission materials, relying on anamorphic bokeh to look like distant lights rather than modeling a skyline. I didn’t want to build out a full city for something that’s meant to stay soft-focus and background. Maybe I should add more of those. Here is my original reference: (Sorry, I could not upload images at first).

The right side in the later shots specifically has nothing yet. Here’s a reference screenshot of the actual location in San Pedro:

I guessed it would be this dark in real life, which is partly why I left it empty, but I think your observation that it looks more void than unlit is correct. I’ll add distant harbor/city lights and some palm trees and objects to give it some depth.

No other traffic: Good call. I’ll add some stopped cars at intersections during the 180 shot and through the residential stretch.

Crash: I wanted to cut it away just before impact because the impact itself felt daunting to pull off. You cannot see this in the compilation I uploaded. But I decided that it doesn’t work. I am now thinking about cutting to the passengers’ perspective just before impact. The windshield can crack by animating a texture over it. I can make the hood crumple with shapekeys, and the car skids/rolls back slightly instead of just stopping dead

As for sound, yes, this is planned! The shots in this compilation are actually intercut with a parallel scene in the final film that also includes voice-over, which I didn’t include here because I think it would be just noise for getting feedback, so I left proper sound design out. On the actual project timeline, I only added preliminary sound effects. I will add sound before deciding whether I want to do any major changes.

[Brotherming95 (Tony Cheuk)]

Thanks Randy!

The first point: That’s actually two different cars, not the same one falling behind and catching up. The car turning its lights off terminates the pursuit ominously. In the final film the next shot is intercut with other scenes, which I hope makes that clear. Maybe I should give the cars different colors or something!

On the shootout: I think I know what happened. I swapped the order of the last two shots. If the shot that suddenly turns to look at the two guys getting shot had come first instead, it would actually respect the 180-degree line. Good catch.

On storytelling more broadly, you’re not the first person to bring this up, so this is a problem I probably have to delve into. Some context: this chase was originally planned to be more elaborate when I wrote the script, but I compressed it because in the whole show, this kind of action is secondary and would be too much of a tonal shift to be honest. In the actual film there’s a voice-over and a parallel scene running alongside this to speed things up. The chase itself leads into a foot chase that’s the real climax of the sequence. So what feels like the climax here is actually hinting at the wrong place. I left that context out because I was mainly after feedback on the visuals rather than the story, but it is something I could have clarified in my original post!

Thanks for your feedback and I will chew on it a bit more later today.