Car Grip

Clamping the camera to the car makes the car the still thing and the world the moving thing. The audience reads that as being carried, because it matches what riding actually feels like from inside.

It is also the only way to hold a detail of a vehicle steady at speed. A wheel arch, a door handle, a face at the window, all rock solid while the landscape smears behind.

The rig bolts to the body panel, the bonnet, the door or the roof, and the camera then shares every movement the car makes. Nothing in the frame is allowed to float.

Whatever part of the car is in shot becomes the anchor, and the eye locks onto it. The wider the lens, the more landscape streaks past the edges and the faster the shot reads.

Vibration is the one thing to control. A hard mount picks up every bump, which sells the road but can shake the frame apart, so the mount is usually damped rather than rigid.

Use it for travel, for a journey that has to feel long, and for any shot where part of the vehicle should stay rock steady in frame.

Leave it alone when the car has to look fast from outside. The car is motionless here, so all the speed has to come from the background.

Buckle Up is a car grip pointed inward at the occupants. Car Grip usually looks along or across the vehicle, with the body panel itself in frame.

The test is what holds still. If part of the car is nailed to the frame, this is a grip shot. If the car body drifts or sways at all, the model has given you a chase.

George Miller ran Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) on rigs clamped to the vehicles themselves, which is why the cars read as solid objects with a desert going by rather than as models moving across a plate.

The car drifts in the frame, which reads as a chase shot instead of a mounted one. Say the vehicle is rock steady and the camera is fixed to the body.

The other failure is a background that barely moves. Name the landscape and say it streaks, because the car is the only thing that should be still.