justanotheridijiton:

When you see our guys driving down the road at night, they’re right here. Every single time. This is called the ‘Poor Man’s Process’,“ Wanek told us. “Our director of photograph Serge [Ladouceur] has developed this system along with our grips and our lighting [crew] to make these lights flash and pass [the car]. They rock the car and spray a little mist on the wind-screen depending on what the weather was like outside when they shot. This is called the PMP and we use it all the time. I think we do it better than anybody, because I watch the show [and] I know it’s right here and I still buy into it that we’re on the road.”

While the PMP technique works well for night-shoots, the show doesn’t really utilize it for daytime scenes. Some shows do a rear-screen projection technique, where they go out with a van that has cameras all around it, and it shoots a 360 degree view going down a highway, for example. Then they put up screens all around the car and then all the scenes are pieced together on the screen. But Wanek claims that the technique isn’t as effective and doesn’t look as real, so they tend to stay away from doing that. Instead, SUPERNATURAL uses a car with an arm and a camera on it that follows or drives around the Impala, which allows the crew to shoot close-ups and distance shots.

SUPERNATURAL films very few scenes of the car driving down the road for each episode. Wanek said “we had a unit that went out and shot a bunch of [scenes] for like a week. And Phil Sgriccia, one of our producers/directors, took a separate unit and went on all these back roads and did a bunch of stuff with the car passing, at night [and] day, pulling into seedy motels, all this other stuff. So now that is our stock footage. So we implement that every time we can. Because it takes a lot to set up a car driving shot. So by building up this library, we use it until people get sick of it and [then] we do another unit [of shooting].”

SUPERNATURAL: Behind the Scenes With Set Design and the Impala (x)