"Four cars on P3, ain't drove 'em since June." The cars are half of DREW's world and the hardest thing in the film to get right. Every rule on this page came from a take that went wrong.
The cars
- The orange McLaren. His car, and the one Claudia rides in ("'cause it match her hair and tee"). In the film: at the hotel entrance with a door up, on the wet street, and as the car they ride in at night.
- The silver one. "Orange when I want it loud, silver when I'm low key." The revision passes added a silver car for that line; in the cut it sits on a wet street under red traffic lights, him beside it.
- The garage, level P3. Four supercars in a row (orange, silver, red, white) on a wet concrete floor under strip lights, with a giant crystal crescent moon standing among them.
Parked, always
Moving cars warped. So prompts never say "pulls up", "drives in" or "speeds off", and every car shot starts the same way:
Locked-off tripod shot. McLaren parked, engine off, wheels still.If the line wants motion, put it somewhere else: a slow camera push, people moving around the car, him stepping out, the city moving behind the glass. The driving shots with Claudia are shot from the hood looking in, two people and a steering wheel, the street a blur in the windows; the car itself barely has to do anything.
Describe the door, don't name it
The model doesn't know what a butterfly door is. Write the hinge and the arc instead:
The door is hinged at the windscreen pillar and swings forward, up and outward in one arc. Only the driver door opens.And always say which door, and that the other one stays shut. Never let both doors open at once in a moving shot.
The car recipe
The film's own car prompt (shot 10), copied from the generation log:
Locked-off tripod shot. McLaren parked, engine off, wheels still. Underground concrete garage with a giant jeweled moon sculpture and two other cars behind. The man in a black coat walks in from the left, crosses to the orange McLaren, puts his hand on the door. The door is hinged at the windscreen pillar and swings forward, up and outward in one arc. He looks back at camera with a calm smirk. Real 35mm film look, natural grain, steady overhead fluorescent light with no flicker, slightly gritty, not glossy or CGI.Add his identity text at the end.
Start and end frames for the hardest shots
For the hardest door shots, the film stopped asking the model to imagine the door and gave it both ends: a still with the door closed as the start frame, and a still with it open as the end frame. The model only has to connect them.
A pair is one scene with one change: the same car, the same place, the door closed in one and open in the other. See Stills for how to make one.
Keep the scene in one look
One of the revision notes: keep the garage scenes in one look. If he's in the black overcoat at the start of a garage shot, he's in it at every cut back to the garage. Cars make this easy to get wrong, because each car shot is generated on its own.
Names and badges
The cars are drawn after real designs and belong to their makers. Keep text and logos out of the prompt and out of the frame ("no text, no logos"). If a badge or a plate comes back readable, fix the still before it feeds a video.