I thought it might be interesting for you all to see the setup I used a couple of years ago when DPing driving plates for the CBS series Madam Secretary.

My brief was to capture day and night plates driving around Washington DC and environs to be used as replacements for greenscreen (or as LED wall content) when shooting car interior scenes on our stages. We would try to get close to a 360-degree field of view to allow our directors maximum flexibility when blocking car interior scenes. Here’s a brief clip showing an example of the finished product (in this case I also shot the first-unit car interior scene at a later date):

So, my first step was to plot out the rig we would need to use and start communicating with our VFX team, our grip team and our camera rental house about what our technical needs were.

We settled on a ten-camera array with each camera covering a 60-degree field of view on a 20mm lens. As you can see from the following diagram, we sacrificed a little coverage in the front-facing cameras by having only three instead of five as we did in the rear. While this was largely done because reducing the rig from 12 to 10 cameras was extremely helpful for practical and budgetary reasons, it is also the case that those "missing" angles are rarely to never used with how we tended to block car-interior coverage.

From that diagram, our key grip designed a cheeseplate and dovetail rig to mount the cameras on our shoot car (in this image the orientation is turned 90 degrees to the left of the diagram above):

Once the plate was mounted on top of our e-car all ten cameras were placed and aligned on the dovetails and the tedious work of rigging all the video monitoring cabling, power cabling, slaved Preston focus and iris control systems, timecode and genlock distribution and start/stop sync hardware could begin.

The rig in place on top of our shoot car

Detail showing the camera bodies and lens control

The cameras and the monitor all, of course, need power, so our camera assistants and electrics rigged block batteries (for the cameras) and a small generator (for the monitor) to the front of the car.

The first AC and I rode on these jumpseats mounted on the rear of the car. He had a Preston FIZ handset allowing him to pull focus, if necessary (it rarely was; VFX wanted the background plates shot in-focus so they could defocus them to taste when compositing), on all cameras simultaneously while I had a Preston single-channel handset so I could also simultaneously ride the iris on all ten lenses (which I only needed to do for the day work). It... took a few minutes to get used to hanging off the back of the car as we zipped around the city.

And finally, a view of the monitor the AC and I were looking at as we drove. Watching this while driving was definitely a little nausea-inducing at times.

Anyway, I hope this was an interesting insight into one way to pull off capturing driving plates. Hit me up in the comments with any questions!