The Ultimate Plate Van for MINDHUNTER

From Jarred Land (Facebook) with Matthew Tremblay (Facebook), and Christopher Probst (Instagram)

Christopher Probst: “The idea behind the setup is, 11-12 cameras are rolled simultaneously covering all pre-determined angles, focal lengths, heights and degrees of tilt that will be shot of the actors in the corresponding picture car on our custom greenscreen process stage.”

Jarred Land (President at RED):

David Fincher‘s insane Plate Van for Mindhunter. 11 Epic Dragons on Global Dynamics United Tilt Plates all triggered by one detonator. Great Design Colab between Fincher, Myself and Christopher Probst.

All things considered, this wasn’t actually as expensive as it would seem.

I had a bunch of the 80/20 extrusions left over from previous projects and those Black Magic monitors I bought for super cheap online. My engineers built the 11 camera trigger out of a left over battery shell for about $40 in parts.

The initial design process was super efficient because 80/20 has plugins for SolidWorks so Fincher and I spent a lot of time on the computer pre-visualizing everything and we could figure out the weak links very quickly before we even had the van.

The GDU low profile bombproof tilt plates which Fincher, Matthew Tremblay and I designed we built just for this (which became the GDU tilt plates) seemed exotic but was actually way more cost effective than buying or renting dutch or tango heads that were expensive and not really made for what we were using them for. Remember this is a multi-year show so they actually are saving a ton of money designing it and building it rather than just renting everything for such a long period of time… it likely has already paid for itself.

This is just the prototype of something Fincher and I have been working on for a few years now and it’s going to get way way more badass as time goes on.

Patrick Harbron / Netflix