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Observe the Details of the "Mad Max: Fury Road" Cars in Studio Lighting, Prior to Their On-Screen Destruction

Also, check out how the designer distinguished the male and female vehicles

By Rain Noe - March 2, 2017

in Cars

As Ralph Gilles put it, the challenge an auto designer faces is to create a vehicle now that will still look relevant ten years into the future. The potential reward is to have produced an enduring piece of design that will be experienced and remembered by millions.

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Production Designer Colin Gibson had a very different task: To design vehicles that looked relevant a century or more into the future, and which would not endure, but would be destroyed by explosions and impacts. Gibson was tasked with designing the vehicles for Mad Max: Fury Road, working within the fantastical world of director George Miller's dystopian, post-nuclear-holocaust vision.

Though most of these vehicles were spectacularly transformed into scrap during filming, thankfully photographer John Platt was invited to document them in their unscathed form prior to shooting. So here we have a view of these cars as you've never seen them, in a jarringly-clean and well-lit studio environment, allowing you to observe their details.

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Given the opportunity to pore over the photos, it's interesting to see how Gibson visually distinguished the vehicles of the two warring tribes the movie centers around. The bulk of the rigs driven by Immortan Joe's War Boys are brutally functional muscle cars bristling with projectile weapons and skinned in a paradoxical mixture of rust and gleaming chrome. As seen in the movie, they operate out of a central base where the vehicles are serviced and maintained.

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In contrast, Furiosa's all-female Vuvalini clan are nomads, endlessly wandering and with no central base. I can only guess that Gibson studied the kit of horsebound Native Americans and yurt-dwelling Mongols; the Vuvalini's vehicles, all two-wheelers, are covered in well-worn textiles, with nary a bit of chrome to be seen.