[woodcote]

I discovered over the weekend that I live in the same town where the Red Bull 2017 Grand Prix Guides - featuring Carrera Digital132 track and Carrera cars - were filmed and edited. You might remember them - a mix of cute animation and quirky live action with the Red Bull and Toro Rosso drivers edited in...

Here's the first one:



The SheepFilms team of Brighton-based artists and filmmakers built all the tracks in one of their studios using the track plans on the Carrera website (www.carrera-toys.com/route-planner). With the Carrera track system being so big, very few of the designs fitted the three 4 x 8 foot boards, so there were quite a few tweaks. Denise, the team member who I was chatting to, created the sets on an incredibly tight schedule and also shot most of the track and car footage. She is particularly proud of the Monaco film set, which was mostly built out of the packing cases the Carrera equipment arrived in from Austria. The track plan needed considerable modification to fit the drivers' dialogue...

         

And here's the Monaco video guide...



If you search "Red Bull slot car video" in Google you'll find most of the season's videos on the Red Bull website. Here's another that's on YouTube - a guide to Suzuka...




And the postscript is... I am now the proud owner of the Carrera Ferrari 458 that was used as the camera car in some of the videos

[Scuderia_Turini]

Cool ! and nice acquisition...
I only recall seeing one of these, cannot recall which. I didn't realise there was a series.

Leo

[woodcote]

One of the films on the Red Bull website is a nice 'Making of' video here: www.redbull.com/gb-en/videos/on-track-with-carrera-making-of%E2%80%A6-max-verstappen

That Google search also throws up a few films from the 2016 season too - heavier on slot car action and not quite as quirky...



And here's another from 2017 with Carlos Sainz Jnr...




One thing that Denise told me was that they really struggled with the Carrera track and the connectors - you can see a few gaps and red tabs poking through in some of the shots.

SheepFilms did a few more shorts for Red Bull last season and you can find them alongside some quite surreal animation on the SheepFilms facebook page. It's great that a one-man-band - together with some of his arty friends and colleagues - can end up producing some fabulous slot car / motorsport videos for one of the biggest brands on the planet. And it all happened less than two miles from where I live...

[Racing Line]

I enjoyed this series of videos, particularly because I was one of the scenery suppliers.