What if you could film a car advert/movie, without needing the actual car? Sounds insane? Well, not anymore. This sleek black buggy-like vehicle is here to change all that.
It also looks really awesome. Like something Batman would go g0-karting with.
This badass looking machine is called the Blackbird and it’s an all electric “stand-in car” developed by the wizards, I’m assuming, that are behind The Mill. I say stand-in because that’s what the Blackbird does — it can become virtually any car from the past, present and even in the future.
How it works is brilliant. The Blackbird is a fully customisable vehicle that is designed to mimic vehicles right down to the length and width. It does this with an adjustable chassis which you can extend up to an extra 1.2m or widen by up to 25cm. Its suspension can also be altered to fit pretty much any chassis you’d want.
But, different vehicles have different engines and each engine will behave a little differently. That’s why the Blackbird’s electric drive power curve can also be fully tuned to match something from a rear-wheel drive V8 monster to an all-wheel drive flat four.
This also means that a manufacturer can shoot their car advertisement before the production version of the car is even finished. Just slap on the right wheels to the Blackbird and let the magic of visual effects fill in the rest.
It’s also got an array of cameras mounted on the top which can be used to capture and 3D map the environment that the Blackbird is being driven in.
So, everything will be accurate to the letter. The shadows, the way a car behaves under hard cornering, the tire smoke, and even true-to-life reflections (thanks to what the camera rig can record).
It’s absolutely stunning and even though I don’t intend to shoot car advertisements anytime soon, I want one.
[SOURCE]
