Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I gots some fun reading for you today. I love these kind of reports... average joes pulling spy-shit... risking fines and loss of equipment from the local Po-Po just to get glimpses at true geek stuff. Enjoy the below. I sure did!
Just got back from visiting the ersatz set of Batman Begins on the freeway in Waukegan Illinois. If you post this, call me Spyboy (used to be in the chat constantly a long while ago).
Well, local news and media have been telling those of us on the Wisconsin/Illinois border about how an approximately three mile stretch of the freeway in Waukegan Illinois will be shut down due to the shooting for Batman Begins (well, they were still calling it intimidation game in the news). Anyways, a few friends and I decided to go down to Waukegan (we're from Kenosha, about 30 minutes to the north) and see if we couldn't spot anything interesting.
We parked at a local coffee shop only a little ways away from the freeway. Just as we left the parking lot, we saw the Batmobile pull out from a side street and head towards the onramp. I tried to pull my camera from my bag to get a shot, but a cop who was assisting in blocking off the street told me to put it away, as anyone found taking pictures would have their cameras confiscated. We started to turn back, as we could not go any further, and saw a Squad Car drive by, fully marked up as a Gotham squad, complete with the giant "GPD" on the sides. We looked across the street to see a field where they had parked all the cars that would be used in the filming, along with two helicopters. One of the helicopters was for the filming, giant camera mounted on the lower front, while the other helicopter had been painted as a "GPD" police chopper, with a large search light mounted on the front.
We were finally turned away by the officer, and decided that we would try some of the side streets to see if we could get closer. Unfortunately, they were all dead ends. We then came across a school, which had a large forest separating it from the freeway. We walked through the forest (with all it's pricker bushes, swamp area, and poison ivy) to get closer to the shooting.
When we finally stopped, we had hidden ourselves in some brush, a mere fifteen feet away from the right most lane of the freeway. We watched as they ran through slow practice runs of how they wanted the cars to move on the street, (we then had a near miss, when one of the tech guys decided to drop his pants and piss into the woods, about ten feet away from where we were hidden) and when it finally got dark enough, they began the real filming.
Now I know most of you out there have probably seen the footage from when they closed down Lower Wacker Drive in Chicago to shoot some Batmobile footage...but it was nothing like this.
They shot a group (couldn't get an exact count, but probably around 10) of squad cars tearing down the freeway at about 60 mph, chasing the Batmobile, and then another few shots of the Batmobile chasing after the squads. But the most exciting shot was when the Batmobile was weaving through the squad cars at about 80 mph, then weaving through the normal traffic (shitbox cars, SUV's, and Semi's).
A friend of mine had taken the camera and climbed twenty feet up a tree to get some good shots of the action, but unfortunately, we had forgotten to turn off the flash (hey, with all the excitement, you would too!), and he snapped a few pictures, immediately getting the attention of pretty much everyone driving by.
We decided to leave when the cars started slowing to a crawl, with the people inside them looking in our direction.
Spyboy
