Call us naïve, but we sort of assumed that most of crashes and car stuff that happened in the Christopher Nolan Batman Trilogy were real. New Deal Studios crafted these 1:3 scale miniatures of most of the key vehicles used in the trilogy. Batman's Tumbler, the Bat, the Joker's garbage truck, and even an ordinary school bus were all hand-crafted and used as practical effects so that Nolan wouldn't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars wrecking actual vehicles. Effects like the plane being hijacked in The Dark Knight Rises (spoiler) were obviously not done as setpieces, but it's crazy to see how the tunnel scene from The Dark Knight was shot.
Building miniatures is an impressive feat on its own, and making them seem real on screen takes an insane amount of talent. But does seeing behind the curtain take away a bit of the excitement? It's still more exciting than seeing behind-the-scenes of a film shot entirely on green screen, but we kind of wished that there was an abandoned tunnel somewhere with fragments of the Tumbler still lodged in its pillars.
For more photos of the miniatures, head to ComicBookMovie.com.
[via io9/ComicBookMovie]
