Whenever I see nice cars in films and TV shows being completely demolished, I can’t help but cringe a little because some of those cars I would love to own! Anyway, thanks to Movies Insider, I’ve learned something about preparing for car destruction in films that I never knew before!
JEM F/X is a special effects house in Southern California that is hired to strategically weaken cars for crash and destruction scenes in films and television. The video came with the note:
We visited JEM FX to find out how its team of effects wizards primes cars to get destroyed spectacularly on camera.
Narrator Abby Tang describes how the team at JEM F/X strategically scores different parts of the cars to create specific types of crash scenes.
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.
I thought this was super interesting and I hope you enjoy it as well.