Cottonwood Update #7: The Crash Car

We are getting very close to our first day of filming. The first film date is June 4th and from then on it is going to be very busy. I want to tell you a little bit about our "crash car" for the film. In the movie Greg gets into a bad car accident. I started looking around for a car we could crash when my friend, Tylan contacted me and said he has one we can use. It is a 1995 Subaru Legacy in pretty bad condition. The car was free though and it runs so I was going to do whatever I could to make it work for the film. I went out to look at the car and the first thing I noticed was a huge hole in the front of the car. I knew we would need to fix this so we got right to work. The above picture is the giant hole.

We bought a bunch of cans of the expanding spray foam and filled in the huge hole. This foam gets really really big and so it was perfect to use to fill in this massive chunk missing from the car.

We let it dry for a couple of days and then went with a grinder and cut off the massive chunks. We got it down to a good level and then started to sand it down. This is not supposed to be a perfect looking. Just better than a massive hole in the front of the car.

After sanding it down I went over the edges of the foam with bondo. I did not bondo the entire thing which would end up being a mistake, but not a huge deal. We then primed the entire foam layer.

We got perfect match paint and painted the whole thing over. It would have been perfect if I would have put bondo over the entire layer of foam, but for the sake of time and money I didn't. The final product is not bad at all. Nowhere near perfect, but a lot better than a huge hole in the front of the car.

Filming is coming up fast and I am so excited. So many different things are coming together and everything is really working out well. I will continue to update you every Tuesday on how filming goes.

Huge thanks to Paul, Tylan, and Colin for helping with the car!

Ethan Clerc