How Cars Are Destroyed For Movies & TV | Movies Insider | Insider

Car crashes in movies like “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” (2021) may look random and chaotic. But pulling off destruction that spectacular on camera requires hyper-tailored prep work — both on the cars themselves, and on other set elements. We visited JEM FX to find out how its team of effects wizards primes cars to get destroyed spectacularly on camera. Taking a Buick LeSabre as our case study, JEM’s technicians showed us how they score a car’s roof pillars and replace its door hinges to set it up for optimal wreckage. Then we saw how the weakened car responded to various forms of destruction, from having a 3,000-pound weight dropped on its roof to getting its doors whacked off with a forklift. The team at JEM also walked us through some highlights of their automobile effects work on “Shang-Chi” (2021), “Bright” (2017), “Taken 3” (2014), and “Velvet Buzzsaw” (2019). For more from JEM FX: