Can anyone tell me what mods, if any, they did to any of the MINI/Mini for the movie, or point me to a site that has that info.

Thanks

 

No. 1 Answer is:

"Took out the trunk and modifiued the rear seat compartment to hold 2000 lbs of "balinese" gold!!"

 

Believe it or not, many of the MINIs used in the subway scenes are electric!

Now THERE'S a mod for ya!!

 

>> Believe it or not, many of the MINIs used in the subway scenes are electric!
>>
And you thought YOU had great gas milage!!

 

I don't know about mods-but they had to disable some of the safety features because the MINIs didn't want to crash

 

Yes they were upgraded.

see
http://miniitalianjob.com/
for details

In the subway scenes one requirement was that all of the cars be electric due to safety reasons in that kind of enclosed place.
There were something like 32 coopers from BMW given to the movie crew to use and there was a roving repair unit to fix the busted up minis on the fly.
there were a few high performance models in each of the colors to do extra stunt work and bunch of less modified ones for regular use. I think they banged up about 30 cars and "Stella bridger" personally messed up 14 of them.

In reality the amount of gold that each mini was supposed to carry far exceeded the weight maximum load for the tires so they would have handled super badly.
Each brick of gold weighs 31 pounds and about 57 were needed to be loaded in each mini. Since they were held in metal boxes in the rear area the seats were either pulled out or folded flat. In the movie the upgrade specialist says each mini lost 200 pounds.

If you look- only the red one is a cooper S. The rest are coopers. Not sure if any are CVT.

So go searching around on the trivia site for more answers. Have fun

_________________
03MCS-IB/W, aero grille, white tail lights, MB Quart speakers, euro parcel shelf, Madness intake/ rear swaybar- Get In.Get Out.Get Even-Motor On

 

But, no special f/x.... take that 2f2f croud...

Rocketboy_X

 

Of course they mentioned mods in the dialogue, but I'll bet the actual cars were all over the place (...as far as mods go) depending on the scene. (for example, the electrics, as mentioned.) The exhaust note sounded pretty aggressive, but I'd be surprised if they really modded all the cars. (...maybe just a few dozen? ) BTW, I can't imagine that first MINI (IB) coming out of the big pipe survived. It looked like it was landing almost nose first, while in the following angle (...from the side) seemed to show the CR and PW coming out at a less acute angle.

 

I know for sure that the horn was modified in the movie! In the scene where the gang is making their first attempt and there is a party going on next door, Marky Mark honks at some party goers and it sounded like MEEP MEEP!

My horn does NOT go MEEP MEEP!

Pretty funny...



Anybody else catch that ?

 

Cool...I'll watch for that as I'm going to see the movie again today! I like MEEP MEEP!!!!

 

In most movies during the editing phase, sound effects tracks are laid down over the video so it doesn't really matter what the true exhaust or horn sound is. The ambient noise level at time of shooting is usually very bad on the set unless it is done in a sound studio. Wind and other noises affects the original track so they are likely just to use the video only and dub in everything else as needed. This gives control and a much better quality of sound. Just try it out on a home camcorder video, you get all sorts of stuff that you didn't ask for in the audio- jets and planes overhead, other people's voices, dogs, wind noise on your mic, etc.

And yes there were only a few modded MINIs and the rest were more or less cosmetically similar rather than performance modded. The car stunts were all real, no CG for the MINIs. But the drivers were sometimes not who you thought they were. Several of the cars were modified to have two steering wheels so the actor was in the front left and the stunt driver was in the front right doing the steering through the stunt.

_________________
ALOHA

 

>>In most movies during the editing phase, sound effects tracks are laid down over the video so it doesn't really matter what the true exhaust or horn sound is. The ambient noise level at time of shooting is usually very bad on the set unless it is done in a sound studio. Wind and other noises affects the original track so they are likely just to use the video only and dub in everything else as needed. This gives control and a much better quality of sound. Just try it out on a home camcorder video, you get all sorts of stuff that you didn't ask for in the audio- jets and planes overhead, other people's voices, dogs, wind noise on your mic, etc.
>>
>>And yes there were only a few modded MINIs and the rest were more or less cosmetically similar rather than performance modded. The stunts were all real, no CG. But the drivers were sometimes not who you thought they were. Several of the cars were modified to have two steering wheels so the actor was in the front left and the stunt driver was in the front right doing the steering through the stunt.

 

Using the actual sound clip from the car would assume that the sound editor had the desire to be authentic. Probably the editor is responsible for many many thousands of sounds throughout the movie and would have disposal to a huge library of audio sound effects that are already fine tuned and in a form that is most efficient to use.

If authenticity is important for whatever reason then the sound people will have to record and clean up those additional sound clips. so it all depends on the resources and desire of the sound editor and staff to "do the right thing".
And use the real sounds. However I would expect that they did the easy way out and just did whatever sounded good.

Here's an example. I just got the DVD for Red violin- a story of a great violin passing through several hundred years of time and changing hands along the way. Throughout the movie the violin is played by various owners. Do you think that the sound you are hearing is coming from the actual Red violin? Certainly it is not being played by the actors. And in fact the violin itself is one of many "red violins" used during the shooting- it itself with no particularly good sound. The music you hear is specifically made for that scene for the purposes of giving you a sense of how styles of music over time have changed while this violin passes from owner to owner. A wonderful movie, well done.

On the other hand if the sound editor was given the green light to be "authentic" or even if (s)he is a mini owner, then maybe you are right!

 

It was just simply something I noticed...

 

I'm a documentary producer so we use a good bit our recorded sound, but those crazy film guys spare no effort to get it right and create their magic. It never ceases to amaze me the way various elements are combined so seamlessly that we even have to discuss whether they're real or not. Hard to tell???...then they've done their job!

_________________
'03 IB/W Cooper

 

[quote]Originally posted by minihume
[b]And yes there were only a few modded MINIs and the rest were more or less cosmetically similar rather than performance modded. The stunts were all real, no CG. But the drivers were sometimes not who you thought they were. Several of the cars were modified to have two steering wheels so the actor was in the front left and the stunt driver was in the front right doing the steering through the stunt.

And from an LA Times article on the movie, it said that some of the cars were made with special suspension for jumps; some were camera cars, designed for camera mounts; others were specifically 'picture cars'. The stunt cars not driven by actors had roll cages inside.

As for the need for electric cars, the MTA banned gasoline-powered cars from its underground locations.

 

I noticed at one point the DSC light flashed. Also the airbag lights tended to be on so I imagine they disabled them.

In response to the original post, there is no real "one" set of mods that you can do to make your car act like that. Special camera angles and cuts and several takes make the MINI do cool jumps and nose lands without setting off the airbags and ruining the front bumper. I imagine most of the mods were suspension based and little was done to the engine because you can always use the camera to make the cars look faster.

 

>>I noticed at one point the DSC light flashed. Also the airbag lights tended to be on so I imagine they disabled them.
>>
Dang, did you noticed that the first time you saw it??? Pretty good!

 

i noticed in one scene, just before the helicopter in the garage, you could hear the whine of the supercharger of the red S...some foley artist was hip.

 

Something else I noticed just at the end of the movie... the IB Cooper had 2 exhaust pipes exiting from the center of the rear bumper. I haven't seen any mention of mods to the exhausts on the mini italian job site, but that one was fairly obvious to me. I don't think the same had been done to the PW Cooper though, but I can't be sure about that. By the time I started paying attention to tail pipes the movie was just about over! Anyone else pick up on that?

 

I was looking at tailpipes too, need to see it again though. Looked like a single MC pipe in the IB throughout, except in one scene - could have been the aero kit.

 

I know that there was a car appearance coordinator that was supposed to be watching for inconsistencies of the car appearances from scene to scene to help cut down on the cars looking like they were different than would be expected. For example if you look carefully at the dents on the right mid rear quarter panel of the blue MC near the end of the movie in one final scene the dents were suddenly gone. also the pattern of the helicopter tail rotor dents is different from one scene where the helicopter gives the dents to a later scene where the blue MC comes out of that area.
I'm sure if we have the DVD of the movie and look at each scene we can see all of the flaws. In fact these flaws all exist in every movie and most of the time we miss the errors but we know the MC and MCS so well that the details are glaring to us and relatively easy to pick up.

 

i noticed the twin tail pipe coming out of the bumper too.
and this car was not a cooper s?
I'm sure maybe they modified it and lifted maybe the exhaust for certain stunt purposes.

 

If you saw a blue MINI and there were two center tail pipes then it could have been an MCS used for stunt purposes but they could show only the rear view (so as not to reveal the bonnet scoop). From the side and rear the MC and MCS look very similar. They can alter the look to make them appear identical. Heck they can replace the bonnet on a MCS to make it look like a MC. One of the reasons why they got the aerokit for every car is to make all the cars "look" similar so it didn't matter that some were MC and some MCS. The colors are what might have dictated this. The original IJ had a red white and blue mini so this show wanted to keep that the same but the white is only available in MC flavor so I guess they figured to make the white and blue both MC and the red one could be MCS- so maybe a few stunt blue ones were MCS. There are no MC with twin center tailpipes-at least none that we can buy.

 

>>>>I noticed at one point the DSC light flashed. Also the airbag lights tended to be on so I imagine they disabled them.
>>>>
>>Dang, did you noticed that the first time you saw it??? Pretty good!

Yeah, I've only seen it once. I guess I'm just used to seeing it flash because I forgot to turn it off.