Building the Mad Max machines | Hacker News Reader

Building the Mad Max machines

autoweek.com

144 pointsfezz38 comments

This article from Jalopnik has crazier details about the actual cars. "So what about the War Rig itself? Well, it’s a Tatra with six-wheel-drive powered by two supercharged V8s, a 1940s Chevy Fleetmaster welded to the back of the cab, and a Beetle cabin mounted to the tanker. And it’s the least insane thing in Gibson’s armada."

Edit: yup, forgot link http://jalopnik.com/how-the-man-behind-the-machines-of-mad-m...

You forgot the link I think: http://jalopnik.com/how-the-man-behind-the-machines-of-mad-m...

The peacemaker is awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-CFRAwSShs

Gah that autoplayed and I forgot I had my headset still on. Wow. At least I'm fully awake again. Recommended but turn down the volume on your computer before clicking because that's really loud (un-muffled V8 on a tracked vehicle that makes most Bombardier stuff look very tame in comparison).

The new Mad Max is not a green-screen-fest and it shows. Beautiful movie and it has a physicality that, say, Transformers could never have.

Just give yourself five minutes before you drive home ;)

I remembered where the speed traps were just in time.

Much like Road Warrior.

On the other hand, making a movie where the villains are simply villainous because they are willing to use violence to take oil from people who simply want to live their lives and keep it, that's not exactly the sort of big budget theme Hollywood can stomach. These days the oil scarcity narrative works better for blockbuster audiences with the political subjugation of women as the primary determinant of villainy. Women fighting invaders to protect hearth and home, just don't require enough rescuing for the 21st century.

> I didn’t meet Shira, but I would like to; we corresponded by email while I was in Australia, and she was in Namibia. I did not travel to Namibia for the shoot, so I sent files to her to continue.

This is one of the more fascinating tidbits. Two art directors on a major motion picture that never once met - conferring by email.

I don't know, but I bet they used Dropbox. Dropbox is huge in the film production world. Lots of files to share among distributed teams.

EDIT- LOL. This comment is currently at -4. I have no idea why.

Probably because you're missing the point?

No I think it is because people are missing waterlesscloud's point: dropbox is the place to collaborate (or something like dropbox). Just like plenty of programmers collaborate on github and think of it as a place to collaborate.

It is depressing. Networks are broken to the point where we have services resold back to us to provide the basic functionality that should be inherent in the protocol.

It is inherent in the protocol, but providers are more than happy to deny you the option to use your local connection to host services and NAT took away the peer-to-peer nature of the internet before it really took off.

See: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ (prescient and very depressing read, but read it anyway if you haven't done so).

UPNP and some other firewall traversal tricks restored some of that but asymmetric bandwidth is the norm these days. Maybe with IPv6 we'll see a reversal of these trends.

Exactly my point. Dropbox shoudn't even exist as a business model.

edit - not crapping on dropbox particularly. Lots of things should be basic functionality by this point, sharing files being one of them. If stuff was more like plan9, for instance, things like skype wouldn't exist either.

Why should I be required to leave my computer on 24/7 to share files with some friends?

Required? Perhaps not. But we "should" definitely have the option, and it should appear seamless on other devices with which we share files whether they're getting them from our own machines or from a private encrypted cloud cache.

Isn't that exactly what ownCloud is?

You keep saying the word "should", but you're making a jump from what is (descriptive), to what ought to be (prescriptive).

This is the is-ought problem, or hume's guillotine.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Is-Ought_Explained

Your comment reads--at least to me--as an advertisement for Dropbox.

Hmm. Maybe so. HN is odd about that sometimes.

My intent was merely to add some color commentary. It's not unusual for people on a film project to collaborate remotely, sometimes never meeting. Happens all the time since it's expensive to get people in the same (sometimes far away) place. One of the main tools people use is Dropbox, it's one of those things that really did make the workflow much easier.

Even a small indie film project with no visual effects can have thousands of files that need to be shared between people all over the place. Scripts, schedules, budgets, manifests, insurance documents, rental documents, storyboards, concept art, contracts of a 100 different kinds, lighting diagrams, blueprints, music cues, dailies, etc etc etc. It's really nice to have a tool that makes that easy.

Apparently iPods (as drives) were the sharing method of choice during Lord of the Rings production.

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/ipod-helped-t...

The drivability and safety of the vehicles is impressive, given the aesthetic constraints. I grew up around motorcycle and car drag racing, and I know how squirrelly such vehicles can get!

I raced as a kid myself, but quit after one try at racing my dad's bike. It was full-race B-modified Kawasaki Z1, capable of 155mph in the quarter mile. It would start to shimmy around 130mph. Scared the crap out of me! He was mad that I didn't have the guts to just hang on and ride it through.

A bike that powerful is something to treat with proper respect and I'm kind of surprised at your dad's reaction. With machines like that it is never the machine that is the limit but always the driver and if you're not confident an accident is just around the corner. Confidence you can fake for humans but machines are fairly unforgiving and the kind of punishment meted out at 130mph+ is not the kind of thing you'd normally wish on your kid. Kudos to you (as a dad...) for knowing your limits rather than ending in hospital. I've had only one major bike spill but it was my first and last in one go, it cured me of my sense that I was in control all the time in a split second (just a bit of loose gravel in a corner that was usually clean, nowhere near 130mph).

My dad is an asshole.

And yeah, race track conditions are very different. A drag race is a straight line over more or less flat and smooth asphalt, that can easily be kept clean. The hard part is the vehicles are so fast that even keeping them straight over the width of a two-lane road is a challenge (especially when the front wheels may not be touching the ground for the first hundred feet or more).

I saw a guy get killed racing once, when I was a kid. It was a mixed car/motorcycle event, and the motorcyclists were arguing with the NHRA to get haybales put up around the guard rails at the end of the track. It didn't get done, and a top fuel bike (~7.8 second quarter mile those days) lost control and went into the rail at close to 200mph. That was sobering.

I don't ride motorcycles anymore. Too much sense of my own mortality.

    "A specific challenge designing the vehicles was achieving 
    esthetic qualities as well as functionality. Our vehicles had 
    to look amazing, but beyond that, they also had to drive safely 
    at speed!"

This is an understatement. I was impressed.

I thought the war rig (a main character I'd argue!) was both beautifully designed and executed. Reminded me of one of the four horsemen's horses.

https://lionsandlilies.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/four_hors...

I agree, it was absolutely a character. It was loud and visually intimidating, and even had a temperament. It felt like a dragon to me...under 'control', but wild.

Not to mention that it was kind of the glue that held the group together.

Great movie, and I think the use of actual vehicles contributes a lot to the feel of it.

Agreed! I think its the best "car chase" movie since "Bullitt" [1] (beating out Cannonball Run, the Bourne trilogies, etc).

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062765/

Don't forget "Vanishing Point"! :)

I'm curious if the sound effects were directly recorded from their respective vehicles or if they were mostly done in a studio. A massive component of the Mad Max movie for me was the phenomenal sound work starting from the brilliant score to the unique purr of each vehicle's engine. Only the dialogue mixing is flawed as far as I can tell as I was dumbstruck for two hours straight each time I saw it.

Based on a Top Gear (RIP) interview with one of the actors, all of the dialog had to be rerecorded because the engines were so loud. I wouldn't be surprised if they used actual engine noise, given there was so much of it available.

Honestly, watching this movie I felt like an 8 year old at a monster truck show. Such satisfyingly clever and innovative designs of the vehicles, all REAL machines and not just CGI... really jaw dropping. You just don't see that kinda thing these anymore. I'm still excited by it days after having seen it.

17 years to make this film, and so many chances for it to have died. Amazing the perseverance it must take.

Any word if the director is moving on with the second one? I had heard that he wanted to do it anime-style, like Akira.

Hehheh the movie looks like post apocalyptic wacky races

If you wanted to watch something in more detail, some minor celebrities in the Australian modified car scene did a marketing job for the movie and made their own "Mad Max" style car.

It's an S15 Silvia with an LS1 v8 on knobbly mud tyres.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp0KnUFYB--g_NcNczfkX...

Those machines are nice but somehow I got the feeling they look way too clean. Almost no rust. Very safe. Almost no cracks bumps and what not.. There is missing some creativity here. I think the old movies got this right.

But still: great work!

> Almost no rust

They're basically a cult that worships vehicles and being "shiny", I think they'd have rather well-maintained vehicles.

The cars in the first movie were all in pretty good condition, from memory.

In the first movie civilisation hadn't completely collapsed yet so the cars and bikes look in pretty good nick - which is how they should have looked. It's only in the second film that things get really post apocalyptic & rusty since at that point civilisation was all but gone. (I watched both films back to back last night)

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