We’ve seen pictures of that crazy Lamborghini Huracan with a giant camera hanging off its nose, but now there’s footage showing exactly why the “Huracam” machine was built in the first place: to chase down supercars.
Incline Dynamic Outlet, the company that built the Lamborghini “Huracam”—a vehicle that the group claims is the fastest camera car in the world—recently finished a paid gig at The Thermal Club in California. And now there’s a minute worth of behind-the-scenes footage showing the camera-wielding supercar in action:
I spoke with Nathan Garofalos, who—along with his friend Chris—came up with the idea for the Huracan build while filming Deadliest Catch. He told me that the footage above shows a paid job that his company Incline Dynamic Outlet did for an unnamed client.
He told me that the footage is meant to show what the Huracam can do that a normal camera cannot. “So like, [with a] normal arm-car, if you’ve got 1,600 to 2,400 pounds on top of an SUV... your car can flip going 60 MPH in a turn,” he told me. “We can go 120 out of race-line in a turn, no problem; we did that for four hours at Thermal.”
“For the first time, we’re actually able to capture stuff in speed, and we’re not under-cranking our shots,” he told me, after which he explained how many movie-makers shoot a certain way to make car chase scenes look fast without them actually being fast. “A common way to make stuff look faster is you shoot it at 18 frames a second; so then when you put 18 frames per second on a 24 frames per second timeline, it’s sped up, looking like it’s moving much faster.”
The problem with this method, Garofalos told me, is that it can make the wheels look weird and panning and tilting can yield artifacts.
But the Huracam doesn’t need such movie magic to make car chase scenes look fast, because they can actually be fast, with Garofalos telling me: “The viewer’s gonna be able to see cars in action footage like they’ve never seen before.”