Independent Research Task - hot wiring

Independent Research Task 1 

How to hot wire or break into a car!

The first part of our sequence opens on the survivor getting into an abandoned car and attempting to restart it through the process of Hot wiring.

However, the abandoned cars in our current chosen location are, well, very abandoned, and we cannot guarantee that we would be able to open their doors in order to shoot this hot wiring sequence, so it would also be useful to know how to break into a locked car (to clarify - the survivor would be doing this as part of the sequence, and most likely failing at it, not the production team as a way to get into these cars that don't belong to us)

Hot Wiring

When you turn on the ignition on your car by turning the key, all it does is it generates an electrical circuit that goes from the battery, to the ignition, and to the starter motor, which then turns the engine over to start the car. 

Hot wiring simply means achieving this without the key - this is obviously mainly used to commit theft, so when searching these instructions up I made sure to add a '- for filmmaking' and '-for emergencies' at the end of my searches, even though it ultimately didn't change the content of the results.

All you need for this process is a screwdriver and a wire stripper,  but this can be replaced by a pair of pliers or even scissors, which would be easier to find in this post apocalyptic wasteland.

THE STEPS:

(optional for this project) Step 1

The first step would typically be to insert the screwdriver into the keyhole of the ignition and turn it, which may work for smaller cars.

However, this step isn't really necessary for the rest of the process and not filming this extra shot may save us some time, so we would probably have to skip straight to Step 2.

Step 2

The first step we would film is the survivor removing the steering wheel cover's screws, once the cover is removed, she would then pull out the access panels underneath to reveal the ignition system's wires.

Step 3

The wires will be split up into three different bundles,  she would pick out the bundle with the ignition and battery wire, and then separate those two with the battery wire typically being red in colour (although since we are not actually attempting to steal the car in real life, it wouldn't really matter what bundle she picks out). 

This section may present some issues if we tried to replicate it in person as we would be using a real car on a prop set; so unless these cars are absolutely hopeless to revive, we would most likely have to hide the real wire by perhaps simply not removing the access panel, or by adding an extra bundle of fake wires to the bunch that she would pull out in place of the real ones.

Step 4

Finally, she would remove some of the insulation off of these two wires using the pliers/scissors, and twist them together (this is safe as these wires do not have live wires, and we would most likely end up using fake wires anyway), in real life this would then lead to the ignition, radio and lights turning on - however, she wouldn't succeed at doing so in this sequence as the cars this world setting are long past saving, or perhaps her character is simply not sure how to do it correctly.

Step 5 (not shown)

The next step would be to repeat the process with the motor wire, but at this point in the sequence she would begin to hear the revving sounds, or just simply give up and sit back in the car seat.

Breaking into a car

This process would be a lot more simple and is more of a back-up in case we are unable to open the car doors.

We would have two options for this back-up:

Option 1

We would simply have to shoot the survivor scavenging the ground in the junkyard to find a piece of metal wire - most likely a metal clothing hanger which she could untwist the top of.

She would then just slide this wire in the little space between the window and the edge of the car door and shuffle it around to try and unlock it (she fails to succeed in either scenario so perfect accuracy isn't really necessary as her character is most likely going off of what she has seen in films pre apocalypse, or pure guesswork)

Option 2

This would be the simplest option to film (and consequently the most boring one, but is a safe option in case the last two are not possible to pull off for any reason).

All the survivor would have to do is pull out two small screwdrivers (which she most likely would have collected in previous scavenges and saved them for this moment), jab one into the top of the car door's keyhole, shove the other just below it, and aimlessly twist it around.