All the car advertisements on TV and on YouTube are done by a production company. There are millions of companies working in this business. The movie might be two or three minutes, but takes ages to shot. It is a really tough work and needs nerves made from steel.
Despite, the greatest efforts there are always minors mistakes tend to occur; especially with automatic cars! The automatic cars have four different gear positions; P (Park), R (Reverse), N (Neutral) and D (Drive). As usual, the car drive in D position and P position is selected when the car is parked, very simple. When the car is on P position, the transmission is engaged with a lock to avoid car moving by its own. In other words, in P position, car cannot move. It is similar to neutral but with a locking feature.
However, many production companies forget this basic rule and make funny videos. They always show the scene of engaging the gear lever into drive position and in next scene, we see that car is moving in park position. This is technically impossible. An automatic car cannot move in park position. Most of the time, car is placed on a truck and the shooting is not done in real driving condition, also the actor never actually drives the car. As the drive position moves the vehicle forward, they always leave the gear on park position and record the video.
As you may see in Mercedes’s SLK video for Fashion Week, Melissa Bristos engages the gear lever into drive position and suddenly car starts to move in park position in next scene. We all think that, Melissa drives the car and they achieve this by moving the steering wheel from left to right, while the gear lever is engaged to park position. And this makes an unrealistic video!
I am sure that, agency will be saying this; you cannot leave the vehicle on drive position while the car is over a truck. Actually, you can! Your actor either never leaves the brake pedal or she engages the hand brake. The hand brake is capable of holding the car in stationary at any circumstances. In addition, if you don’t apply any throttle there will not be any problem at all!
Next time, when you shooting a video for a car company please engage the gear lever into drive and don’t create funny videos! Otherwise, you show your behind the scene tricks!
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Mercedes
