Building the Racers – Death Race
September 24th, 2008 artmasterIt took approximately eight weeks of working through concepts before the team began assembling and set up in a Montreal fabrication shop. Explains Austerberry: “We had four draftsmen and two concept artists working in Toronto, then we came to Montreal. There was a huge team [50 crew members] who set up the auto fabrication shop, then we started getting the base cars, the real cars.”
Special effects foreman JASON HANSON and picture-car mechanic BRIAN LOUIS and his crew worked with 30 base cars to gut and get them ready for production. This meant destroying electrical systems, airbags and antilock braking systems. “We stripped them down to bare metal, then built them from the ground up, doing roll cages, fuel cells and racing seats,” he says. “Then the special-effects crew took over and did their body fabrication on the cars.”
Austerberry describes the high-tech process of translating the raw materials into a Death Race car design on computer. “A handheld 3-D scanner [known as AndiScan] was passed over the raw car itself. Then another team in the effects design shop took the concepts and drawings and elaborated on those in 3-D, so they could send them out for cutting and fabrication of the various pieces.” While that outsourcing took place, each base car was stripped of its gas tanks and a fuel cell was installed—as were safety features such as full roll cages that were fitted for specific stunts.
JEAN-MARTIN DESMARAIS, special effects designer and fabrication manager, describes the efficacy of the AndiScan process (which takes approximately one-half day per car) as “highly accurate; it scans within a thousandth of an inch. It uses three optical cameras and three laser sources to find all the points on the surface that are being scanned. It weighs three pounds and scans anywhere you can get the scanner into.”
The 3-D modeling enabled DesMarais’ team to validate placement for all parts—from armored plates and racing seats to weapons—and to find potential conflicts among them. It also allowed Anderson to get a feel for the shots he would be able to achieve with each car…and the visibility actors and stunt drivers would have when driving. The process saved the production about three months of work, about how long it would have taken to hand-fit the 500 to 900 parts put on each of the cars.
It took approximately six weeks per car for the mechanics and fabricators to put the racers together, then another week to make the thin sheet metal that was used to imitate the thick-plate steel armor necessary to survive any blast from enemies. Death Race drivers wouldn’t last long without heavy armoring on their rides. Not to mention the fact that viewers get annoyed when a competitor is blown apart in two minutes.
To account for the armor and guns added onto the cars, Louis and his crew added in heavy-duty suspension. To illustrate, he offers: “On the Dodge Rams, we changed over from a 1,500-pound to a one-ton rear dual axle to take all the weight. On those, we added almost 2,500 pounds with the steel, guns, excess ammo batteries and whatnot in back of that truck. The cannons on the back are almost 800 pounds—just between the two Vulcan cannons on each side of the Dodge.”
Explains MARTIN MANDEVILLE, in charge of building interiors for The Monster, “The inmates scrounge and make cars with whatever they can find, so it was appropriate for us to make this up with stuff from the scrap yard.” His team used a variety of parts, including those from other modes of transport. “I found aluminum aircraft parts and built the napalm dispense. There’s also a series of tanks used for defensive weapons.” The ejection seats were another main feature of Frank’s Monster and play into the story arc. As an actual ejection seat can be quite mammoth, Mandeville simplified its elements so Frank could feasibly eject a couple of seats from his Mustang.
In total, 34 cars—including six Mustangs, five Dodge Rams, four Porsches, three Jaguars, three BMWs and three of each-style Buick—were used to portray the 11 main cars and a few extras from the Death Race. The Fords, Chryslers and Dodges were primarily acquired from manufacturers, while the Rivieras, Porsches and Jaguars were secured online. Additional cars were found through auto-trader magazines.
Building (then arming) the bombastically loud and lethal Dreadnought was a massive task: two tractors were shipped from L.A., and the shell of a tanker was obtained in Canada. The Dreadnought was built in Calgary in a shop with facilities to contain the colossus. NIGEL CHURCHER, in charge of the process, notes: “We wanted it to seem as if it was a reconfigured existing truck, as opposed to something that had been specifically designed and built so that it would suit the rest of the film.”
Though the crew saw pictures of the Dreadnought before it arrived, no one, including Anderson, knew what was coming. The noise of the guns, blazing at once, was deafening. The concussion shook the cast and crew, who cheered when it first drove by.
