Artificial intelligence and computer-generated imagery may be doing their best to take over movies and TV shows, but practical effects still aren’t dead yet. And they won’t be going anywhere anytime soon if directors want their movies to actually look good. Would Mission: Impossible or Top Gun look better with more green screen? No? Exactly. But what’s arguably even cooler than the effects themselves is peeking behind the curtain and seeing how they made it happen. Thanks to YouTube, that’s a lot easier than it used to be, and it also allows amateur filmmakers to do some really cool stuff on a budget.
But just how far can an amateur filmmaker really go? Fake gunshots and bullet wounds are one thing, but what about flipping a car or truck? Those scenes may not always look realistic, but they do look cool, even if someone making short films for YouTube probably doesn’t have Mr. Beast money and therefore probably won’t have a “blow up an Amazon delivery van” budget. Which is why I was so excited to find Tyler Bell, a part-time YouTuber who makes a bunch of special effects videos on the internet for fun. He hasn’t flipped a car yet, but his most recent video is the first step in that direction.
Building an air cannon
With 267,000 subscribers, Bell’s account is still relatively small in the grand scheme of things, although if you’ve seen him before, it was probably his incredibly cool video about shooting actors with arrows. He has plenty of car-related content, too, and we aren’t here for bows and arrows. We’re here for flipping cars. And to do that somewhat safely, you first need an air cannon. Okay, you don’t necessarily need an air cannon, but he started with an air cannon because, I mean, why wouldn’t you? It’s way cooler than some of the other methods.
For this video, Bell needed to build an air cannon that was actually powerful enough to flip a car and test it before moving onto the actual car flipping, so for now, you’ll have to settle for the next-best thing: a motorcycle launch. It might not be quite as awesome as jumping straight to a fiery van flying through the air but, you know, safety first.
Building the air cannon wasn’t exactly cheap, either. According to Bell, the 3,000 psi hydraulic accumulator needed to flip a car cost $2,000, and that’s before you get to the cost of rigging everything up. Lucky for Bell, he runs 3D printers in his day job and has access to a heck of a shop, so with a little editing magic, all the cutting, welding and fabricating that went into this build looks much less involved than it actually would in real life.
So, how did the first test of the new, soon-to-be car-flipping air cannon go? You’ll have to watch the video to find out, but let’s just say he definitely got a lesson in what “stressed member” means.