This car is “Hero #3” (with the first and second cars being on set the day we visited). Picture Car Coordinator Jeff Budnick is in charge of looking after all of the Impalas on set. SUPERNATURAL has nine of its signature car in total – three “Hero” cars, three stunt cars, a few versions that are wrecked, and a cut-up car. The cup-up car is basically a shell of a car and the roof and doors are all able to come off easily so they “can get different angles” when filming.
Hero #1 has a “big block motor in it, a 502”, while the rest of them have “small block” motors. For example, Hero #3 is not a high-performance car, but it runs fine.
Three of the cars have the rearview mirrors on magnets so they can easily come off for shooting. Some of the windshields are also clear, while others have a blue-tinted band to them. They try to use the clear windshields for the “PMP shots”. Some cars also have tinted glass and those are primarily used when they have a double driving the car at night so that the identity of the driver is less noticeable.
Budnick thinks that SUPERNATURAL’s early years of utilizing the PMP technique looked a bit fake, but that the show has come a long way in achieving a far more natural look over the years.
Fans all over the world are building the cars – as far away as Brazil and Sweden, according to Budnick. Fans even contact Budnick to find out “what color I use for this [piece], or stuff like that”. But the interest in the car has made it a bit difficult to find parts, and the parts that Budnick and other fans find are much more expensive than they were when SUPERNATURAL began. “You can’t find a rusted-out basket case for under $10,000 now”, when the car used to be worth $2,500. But apparently car manufacturers are making more reproduction parts for the Impala now because the interest in the model has grown with the show, and so that is making things a bit easier for Budnick.
Back in the very early seasons of the show, the Impala used to have the “spotlights” that you can see on the side of the windshield here. But they were “taken off because the director/producer at the time, Kim Manners, [said] they were always in the way of the camera. So they were always moving them out of the way. One day he goes ‘just take them off’. So I did,” Budnick said. “And then the fans went crazy. It really showed you how passionate the fans were about the car.”
Another reason they picked the Impala (other than creator Eric Kripke’s oft-quoted desire for a cool car with a big trunk), is the fact that the cameras in the earlier years used to be very big. And so production wanted a big “four-door sedan to get in and out of.” Now they have smaller HD cameras and don’t need such a large car, and yet the car has become iconic.
Behind the scenes tidbit: apparently “Jared [Padalecki]’s hit a few things over the years” when driving the car.
SUPERNATURAL: Behind the Scenes With Set Design and the Impala (x)
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)
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