Ever wondered how Top Gear always seems to have amazing looking shots of the cars?
Production value is always super high quality, and Top Gear Series Director, Jon Richards, has recently released a video giving us insight on just how much work goes into getting these perfect shots.
Shot on the set of a shoot for the Lamborghini Huracan STO, the video follows how the shots go from a concept to being woven into the structure of a Top Gear review.
“The trickiest thing for me is to keep the ideas fresh,” says Richards. “I kind of try to find concepts that reflect the essence of, for me, what the car’s about. Other times I just throw some lights at it,” he adds jokingly.
What sounds like a simple concept, and looks amazingly seamless on screen, can take hours to get right.
Read More
“That all happens so quickly, but the reality is we’re in here dialing in a shot for about an hour each time. Like, to get that rear three-quarter there,” says Richards, pointing a shot of a Lamborghini Sian surrounded by flames, “you gotta park the car, you gotta line it up, you gotta bring the lights in, you gotta prevent the reflections from happening, then dial in the flame, the flame doesn’t work, and then the flame comes in the wrong settings, and then the light’s on and the car lights turn off, and you gotta reset. It is nonstop.”
It's all worth it though, and he believes it's what makes the show special.
“One of the big things for me about Top Gear is that we do things for real and we try and capture stuff as real as possible,” says Richards. “We don’t do big, fake CGI things, we don’t do speed-ups, we don’t do, kind of big graphic sequences. What we do is we try and capture as in-camera as possible.”
Check out this beautiful example: