Vanwall Racing asked us to shoot their aero test of an exciting new vehicle at the Catesby Tunnel Vehicle Test Facility in Northamptonshire, England. The former Victorian railway tunnel is a state-of-the-art facility that provides a global benchmark for vehicle testing and aerodynamic research. It’s considered to have ideal conditions for vehicle testing, and it combines repeatability with reality. 

For this test, the car was going to be sent through the tunnel multiple times in the day,  but we were only given an hour to film it – so we had to be quick with getting what we needed. First, we filmed several runs from the back of a pickup truck using a gimbal and portable lighting, with the car travelling behind (and then in front) at around 30mph. This allowed us to capture steady, controlled shots of the car moving which we would speed up later. We deliberately filmed these shots at a low shutter speed so that the motion blur would look correct when speeded up. We further enhanced these shots during editing by increasing the radial motion blur in Adobe After Effects.