Last year we featured the work of Matthew and William Burrard-Lucas, two brothers who mounted their Canon DSLR to a remote-controlled car to shoot close-up photographs of dangerous African animals. The behind-the-scenes video above was just published yesterday, and shows the RC DSLR being driven up to different animals, all of which are clearly thinking, “what the heck is this thing”? They should offer these “BeetleCams” for sale. I want one.

The BeetleCam is a remote controlled car that has a Canon 400D DSLR and two flash units strapped to the top. It’s the brainchild of brothers Will & Matt Burrard-Lucas, award-winning wildlife photographers based in the UK, and allows them to capture some unique photographs of some of Africa’s most dangerous animals.

William tells us,

We are brothers from the UK specialising in wildlife photography. We aim to use teamwork and ingenuity to take unusual shots of wild animals. Recently we embarked on a project to photograph African wildlife from a ground level perspective using a camera mounted on top of a four-wheel drive remote control buggy called BeetleCam. We took BeetleCam to Tanzania and photographed lions, elephants and buffalo with it. The project proved to be a great success and we managed to get some amazing photographs from a unique perspective.

For more photographs from the BeetleCam, and some videos of the cam in action, check out the BeetleCam project page.

Image credits: Photographs by Will & Matt Burrard-Lucas and used with permission

Here’s a nifty behind-the-scenes video by Nissan Canada for a car commercial shot using a 1/10 scale remote controlled car.  In addition to using cranes and camera dollies, they mixed in a few Canon 5D Mark II DSLRs mounted on separate RC cars and a helicam.

Here’s the final product:

(via Chase Jarvis)