How We Did The Last Dance Car Crash

The Method to Our Murder

Now that you've see Last Dance, you may be wondering "Tatty, how did you do the car crash? Did you actually crash the cars? Did you actually kill Maggie?" Well, blogpost reader, the answer to all your questions is no. Except the first one, that's not a yes or no question, but I will answer it right now. This is how we created the Last Dance car crash.

Step 1: Research. When we started this process, we had no clue how to create a realistic car crash, so we did some interweb investigating and discovered a fairly simple yet realistic looking method.

Step 2: Location. We had to find a place where we could film a fake car crash that 1) wouldn't have any other cars, 2) would be lit well enough to film at night, 3) wouldn't look too much like a parking lot, and 4) we wouldn't get busted for "suspicious activity." We settled on the parking lot of Miranda's old elementary school at 10 o'clock at night.

Step 3: Filming. How the heckle are we gonna actually film it? We knew the effect we had to create, but it would be dark, and we had to get close enough shots so you couldn't see the houses in the background. I ended up climbing in and on both cars in many uncomfortable positions to get the shots we needed.

So that's not really a tutorial, but I'll give it to you here:

In order to film a car crash without actually crashing cars, we parked the cars so they were nose to nose with only enough space between them for a person to walk through. Then we taught our actors how to act in reverse, starting with their bodies forward and their heads down, and then when they floored it in reverse, they shot back and looked happy again. In editing, we reversed the shots and sped them up so it looked like they were driving at each other. Then we did quick cuts between angles and a fade to white on "impact" so the viewers couldn't tell that the cars didn't actually crash.

Here are the Youtube tutorials we used to learn the technique: Film Riot https://youtu.be/oHXlMvWtfmw?t=9m16s and Pegleg Media https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJF9bwY1CHo. 

Thanks for being awesome and crash your cars responsibly.