The tech is being recognized with a Scientific and Technical Award.
In 1993, Speed special effects supervisor John Frazier was in a production meeting to work out how they were going to drive the film’s stunt buses around locations in Los Angeles. They could not, of course, be safely driven by Sandra Bullock who finds herself behind the wheel. The filmmakers did not want to tow the bus. Or push it.
“So,” recalls Frazier, “I just kind of laughingly said, ‘Put a stunt driver on the roof, and when he gets to an overpass, duck.’ Little did we know, that’s how all this pod stuff began.”
The ‘pod stuff’ the special effects supervisor refers to is the Blind Driver Roof Pod. It’s that cage contraption that often sits atop a vehicle with a stunt driver strapped into it that you might recognize in behind the scenes featurettes on film car chases.
On Speed, Frazier and his team devised a way for a driver to sit atop the bus where they could control steering, brakes and transmission all the way from the roof. Today, that approach has grown into heavily customizable, rigid and much safer pod set-ups that enable stunt drivers to reach incredible speeds, but of course make it appear (on camera) that an actor is handling the vehicle.
The Blind Driver Rood Pod and the people behind it are being recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a Technical Achievement Award (Academy Certificate) at this year’s Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony. Here’s the official listing:
To Arnold Peterson and Elia P. Popov for their ongoing design and engineering, and to John Frazier for the initial concept of the Blind Driver Roof Pod.
The roof pod improves the safety, speed and range of stunt driving, extending the options for camera placement while acquiring picture car footage with talent in the vehicle, leading to rapid adoption across the industry.
Inspiration from…forklifts
Arnold ‘Fluffy’ Peterson was part of Frazier’s special effects crew on Speed, and the person Frazier credits heavily for making the bus roof-top driving setup possible. For Peterson, the request was very much about solving a storytelling problem. “The director Jan de Bont really wanted to be able to do a 360 inside of the bus while it was moving,” shares Peterson, which he notes meant they couldn’t have a stunt performer at the wheel instead of Bullock. They needed to put the stunt driver somewhere else, but still allow them to control the bus. Steering would be key, figured Peterson.
“The first solution that came to my head was forklifts. The steering system we use on a forklift is a double ended cylinder. It’s called a Char-Lynn valve, which is basically a hydraulic valve with a steering wheel on it and it pumps oil from one port to the other. I realized this was a great way to affect remote steering with a reasonable amount of precision for what we needed.”
One immediate challenge presented itself in the form of the pump to move the oil. It was too noisy. “We had to figure out how to quiet down the pump,” says Peterson. “I had to put an accumulator in the system to quiet down and store oil. Then we had a whole heap of other things to sort out, like the braking system. Also, an emergency brake had to be available to that system in case something went wrong. Then there was running all the electricals. It was quite a process and kind of a frenzy.”
Peterson, perhaps not unexpectedly, became the first person to drive the rooftop set-up. “That was a lot of fun. I would go out with John’s brother onto San Fernando Road and Sunland Boulevard and cruise around testing this thing out. We got a lot of looks.”
Must go faster
After Speed, this new approach of placing drivers on the roof (and, later, elsewhere) took off. Enter Elia P. Popov, whose J.E.M. F/X Inc. now manufactures all manner of pod cars for major stunt sequences. A few years after Speed, he was working on the special effects of Liar Liar where the request came through to blind drive a stair truck vehicle (it’s where Jim Carrey’s character hijacks the vehicle in an attempt to reunite with his son who is in a plane taxiing on a runway).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S3Fod54d3I
“We were in a big meeting at the effects shop on that show, and I was trying to figure out how to remote drive this thing with an actor up high. We threw all kinds of ideas out, and a forklift was just sitting right there, a Hyster forklift. And I’m like, well, look, they have hydraulic steering and they have a Char-Lynn valve. I thought, we could just rob that. The owner of the effects shop said, ‘Well, you’re not robbing my forklift,’ but ultimately that’s how we made the Liar Liar gag work.”
Soon, there was a desire to make the vehicles drive faster. The stair truck was limited to about 30 mph, and the buses for Speed could go just over 50 mph (plus, on that movie, the driver was largely out in the open on the roof). More dynamic car chase scenes where the blind drive approach was called for required much faster speeds and additional safety measures. Plus, attempts to rig conventional cars with the existing set-ups resulted in unwanted drift. Popov searched for a better, faster and safer solution.
“I went to a Hyster shop in Commerce and met with a service manager. I said, ‘Here’s what I’m trying to do.” He looked at me like I was an alien. He goes, ‘Bud, you’re more than welcome to go to our scrap pile. You go rob the parts you want and we’ll sell to you by the pound.’ So for $200 or $300, I walked out of there with everything I needed and all we had to do was make new hydraulic hoses and adapters, and we were able to put the stunt guy down low. That’s how it started for me with the blind drive system. It wasn’t in the ‘pod’ world just yet but we were getting there.”
It would be in the early 2000s–as these blind driving action scenes continued to ramp up–that the idea of adding a roll cage to the setup was considered, in order to protect the stunt driver. “We were all from the race world,” says Popov, “so we just robbed the look of a sprint car. A sprint car is a very short, stout, tall roll cage vehicle that a guy gets in, and most of those drivers were always big. We robbed that kind of thought from the racing world, mixed it in with our world, and away we went.”
The tech gets refined
Peterson and Popov would then come to work together on the 2005 film The Dukes of Hazzard, where a unique solution was required for stunt driving on dirt roads–something more refined than just using forklift parts. “We turned to Fluffy [Peterson] and we said, ‘What do we do here?’” recalls Popov. “He does his normal thing of going off into the corner for a while and coming back with a solution. What he did was take the valve apart and figured out how to adjust the cubic inches of fluid per revolution for us to match the ratios, to make it tighter.”
Later, manufacturers of ‘rock crawling’ and off-road vehicles would come to use the kinds of valve set-ups that suited pod cars for the film work (ie. enabling a way for the appropriate parts to be repurposed for the pod cars), but that was only down the track, notes Popov. Peterson had been able to solve the issue in the intervening years.
“That right there really is what set the mark for everything after that in our industry,” continues Popov. “If Fluffy had not figured that out until the aftermarket companies really came online years down the road, then we wouldn’t have been able to do what we did. It let us get away from forklift parts and into much better performance. So for a time, whenever we’d do a pod from there on out, he would actually sit there and match the transmitter receiver. For a long time, the receiver was just a cylinder, and it was later we went from a transmitter to a motor, so that they all had to do it together. With every step, more performance came into the steering alone.”
The idea, adds Peterson, was that with these modifications the pod cars could achieve more elaborate stunts and higher speeds. “It wasn’t until 2011 or so when we got into the super high speed work. It’s just got so good, and Elia is the master now. He’s got lots of pods on the shelf.”
Further refinement has occurred in the area of electronics, particularly as vehicles have become more computer-centric. “On Gran Turismo, for instance,” discusses Popov, “the Nissan and the Lamborghini were computer-based cars, but all manual transmission. We had to figure out how to shift the manual transmission from the pod on the roof. So we came up with a way of doing it electronically and moving the clutch up there and doing paddle shifts.”
Refinements occurred also in the area of speed–on Gran Turismo, the cars fitted with pods would often travel in excess of 100 mph. Popov’s team added a new direct cable transmitter receiver system as part of the task. “We got challenged to break that 100-mile-an-hour window by the second year director on the film. He wanted to shoot, not just at 100, he wanted to shoot north of 100.They wanted to shoot at the speed the car is rated to be on the track at, which was amazing to do.”
Safety is key
The Blind Driver Roof Pods, and similar setups, are now commonly fitted with roll cages and other rigging to ensure the stunt driver is as safe as possible. This requires some heavy vehicle engineering, as Popov explains in terms of the work carried out by his J.E.M. F/X Inc on a typical pod build.
“When we receive a vehicle, what we’ll do first is remove all the interior, because we have to get to the inside of the actual steel body and find all the strong points. Every vehicle, every manufacturer, has a different way of constructing their vehicle bodies. There’s a certain amount of reinforcement, especially in the B-pillar. The-B pillar is the portion of the vehicle that divides behind your shoulder when you’re driving between you and the backseat, where the door meets the door jamb. That’s your strongest place for a center support.”
“And so we go there always first, and then what we do is custom sew in a structure that’s hidden behind the interior, and we’ll attach that to the vehicle and then from the outside, drill through and safely mount our steel roll cage protective pod to that. We get that thing bolted on there secure, and then from there we look at how we run our hydraulic lines, our brake lines, ignition wiring, all the wiring control shifters and everything. Every manufacturer is different. We’ve actually even done direct rod linkage on a few jobs, because you couldn’t get hydraulics in there at all. It was just the way the vehicle was designed.”
Getting Sci-Tech recognition
The Scientific and Technical Awards presented by the Academy are wide-ranging, and include software and hardware innovations, and, like the Blind Driver Roof Pod, more mechanical type ones. The recipients are extremely proud to be receiving recognition for their work.
“I think it recognizes the contributions that we make and it gives an incentive to always be moving forward and thinking outside the box and finding solutions,” says Peterson. “The Academy is the collection of the people who take this business very seriously, and being recognized by that body is a great honor. It lets you know that hey, you’ve done something that has made movie making more creative, safer, and it brings something to the table, and I really respect that.”
“Also,” contributes Frazier, “there’s 16 awards this year, and we’re like the only mechanical guys, but we’re mixed right in with guys that literally make all the software to make these movies. Here we are–these dinosaurs–still making movies.”
“I was going to say,” adds Popov, “being a mechanical win is cool, but don’t forget, this mechanical device actually works well with visual effects. At some point you will see the pod and so you have to paint that out. Now, with VFX, you can do car to car shots a lot easier. It’s just easier to do clean-ups, and that makes it not 100% mechanical.”
Into the future
Asked to reflect on where the technology is ‘at’ right now, Peterson offers, “When we did Speed–and what a huge thing that was at the time–I never realized then that it was going to go the direction it did. And when I saw Gran Turismo last year, I was blown away by how they photographed that. That was just amazing, because that was the first time I saw the results of the cable steer, and that was really, really, really impressive.”
Popov’s team continues to innovate, including in terms of where to position the pods, using them for larger vehicles, and in improving safety. “We just did a project two weeks ago with a prison bus. The stunt guy takes it over a cliff, hits a ramp and the bus rolls all the way down the hill. What we did there was bring him closer to the center of the vehicle and had not only have a protective cage on the pod for him, but also a cage outside of that. It’s a redundant cocoon over another cocoon. It was great.”
“Wow, we’ve come a long way,” reflects Frazier, “I mean, on Speed, I went to a meeting, I came back, I said to Fluffy, ‘Put the driver on the roof. I’m going to lunch.’ And he did.”
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will honor 16 scientific and technical achievements at the Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony on Friday, February 23, 2024, at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
