The ramps were two planks of Douglas fir laid across a dirt lot in a Utah shipping container yard, and Landon was watching them flex under the front wheels of a Bugatti Veyron worth roughly $3 million. The boards held. The shot happened. And the camera capturing it was smaller than a television remote.
That was the setup for a filmmaking experiment between Landon, an experienced filmmaker, and Megan, a casual shooter who by her own admission knows the Cars Pixar movie better than she knows actual automobiles. Landon handed Megan the DJI Ronin 4D — a cinema-grade camera system he helped launch over a year prior — plus a selection of lenses, a production assistant named Zach, and 90 minutes. He kept the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 and a suction cup mount for himself, with 45 minutes on the clock.
What Megan actually did with a cinema camera and a Bugatti
Megan arrived with a shot list drawn entirely from Lightning McQueen’s opening sequence in the animated film Cars. Within minutes of her timer starting, she was hanging out the window of the Bugatti as it rolled through the container yard, shooting 4K footage of the moving tire below her. ‘I am so scared I think I’m going to pee my pants,’ she said as the car crept forward. The shot worked anyway. She then climbed into the back of a camera car to get rolling footage while Landon drove the Bugatti past, caught interior close-ups of the blue upholstery, filmed the exposed engine components, and captured a sequence of Taz — the car’s handler, who works for owner Ron — steering at speed across the flat gravel. With 10 minutes still remaining, Megan called it. She had what she needed.
Taz, who has spent eight years in the Utah automotive scene, described how he came to work for Ron: ‘In the car space in Utah, all roads lead to Ron.’ Ron is the kind of owner, Taz explained, who will let his Bugatti be driven around a dirt shipping container yard — a detail Taz treated as genuinely unusual among hypercar owners. The same Ron had previously let filmmaker Peter McKinnon drive his Pagani Huayra, a story Taz mentioned with the ease of someone accustomed to extraordinary cars being used rather than kept behind glass.
The moment the Douglas fir boards almost ended everything
Landon’s central shot — his ‘bucket shot’ — required driving the Bugatti inside a shipping container, doors swinging open on cue, with the camera positioned to simulate the feeling of a container being lowered by crane. He bought boards to build a ramp over the lip of the container floor. They looked like they would snap. ‘These are definitely going to snap,’ he said. He retrieved a shovel from his F150, packed dirt beneath the boards to create a firmer ramp, confirmed with Taz that the undercarriage clearance was acceptable, and rolled the car inside at walking speed. It worked. A second crew member named Hunter stood inside the container and pushed both doors open on a countdown. Landon captured the sequence on the Pocket 3, then mounted the same camera via suction cup to the Bugatti’s rear carbon fiber wing — a wing he noted probably cost more than his house — to get a low, moving POV shot on the road.
Back in the edit, Landon spent roughly five hours total on his cut, including an early morning session starting at 5:30 a.m. to work around family commitments. He built approximately 15 layers of sound design to support the shipping container sequence. Megan’s edit leaned into the Cars structure: rapid cuts of the Bugatti from multiple angles synced to engine sounds, with a voice-over drawn from the animated film’s opening monologue — shortened from roughly one minute to fit the 30-second brief. The voice-over, as it turned out, was not Owen Wilson.
Landon’s critique of Megan’s cut was specific: the log footage from the Ronin 4D produced cold blue shadows she hadn’t corrected in color grade, and a few of the hard cuts to black would have landed harder with riser sound effects building into the silence. Her shots, he said, were ‘absolutely amazing’ — the Ronin 4D’s built-in stabilization system made it purpose-built for the kind of rolling car footage she captured hanging out the window.
The suction cup on a wing that costs more than most houses
The Pocket 3 sat fixed to the Bugatti’s rear wing by a single suction cup as the car moved through the Utah lot. Landon watched the feed through the DJI Mimo app on his phone. The wing flexed slightly in the air. The camera held position the entire time.
At the end of the session, Landon and Megan presented the footage on a screen and Megan walked out with the Pocket 3 and a membership to Landon’s filmmaking course — a gift he framed simply: she drove out, let herself be put on the spot, and that deserved something in return. She looked genuinely surprised both times he said yes.
Back in that container yard, the Douglas fir planks are still somewhere in the dirt, probably still holding the shape of a Bugatti’s wheel loading onto them for the first time.
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This article was reported in June 2026.
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