“We need to clear license plates for the 2 cars that will be featured throughout the film. How do you do this?”
We answer that question with a question: “Where are the plates from?” If you say New York, off we go to phone or email our contact at the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles to get answers. Often production has specific alpha/numeric combinations they want to use. They might have existing plates from a prop house that had been created for a previous production that they will now re-use in a new geographic setting. Maybe they want something customized that refers to a specific story element (“MUTANT3” — ?). The clearance company contacts the motor vehicle registration office in the appropriate setting (New York, British Columbia, Rio de Janeiro) to confirm that the plate is not currently in use there.
It is a sunny day indeed when we discover that we can do the searching ourselves, online, at a website. Anyone who has owned a car is familiar with the often frustrating levels of complexity of the bureaucracy at their local government’s car registration office. Cracking the “who can help” nut with this enquiry can take more than a few phone calls and absolutely more than a minute on hold. Further complication on our end arises when the story is set in a foreign country. We typically have to hire a translator to navigate the foreign motor vehicle bureaucracy in search of answers to our bizarre question.
We recently had the tables turned on us when one of our regular motor vehicle department contacts asked us to do some research for them. They wanted to know how production companies make their film and television license plates. To return years of favors, we collected a sampling of answers, reproduced here:
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- “Well the plates are usually vinyl because they are less expensive, sometimes for far background they may be laminate! Some prop people have an inventory of plates from shows gone by and these are usually metal.”
- “I know that in general, when faking signs and that sort of thing, they often use vinyl wraps that would cover an existing signs. License plates I’m sure would need to be a bit sturdier, but my gut tells me they’d use a stiff vinyl/styrene/plastic type of thing to put over an existing plate when and if necessary. To be honest I can’t recall a situation where we’ve done this on a show that I’ve worked on, often times we would purchase our own vehicles and register them as our own, so that we would then own the plates and wouldn’t need to hide them.”
- “We make our Film License plates two ways. The first way is just Laser printing on a plastic called Styrene, and the second way is also using Styrene but we Vacuform the letters to have raised letters.”
- “I think they are a form of styrene plastic. Some are 3D, and are hot moulded to form the raised letters, and custom cut vinyl stuck on for the colours/art. Some are just flat plastic with numbers/art printed on them or again with the vinyl. That’s all I’ve ever used.”
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First published June, 2014