Tim Minear

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. - A secret, illegal cross-country auto race is under way, and much of it is taking place in a barn-size building on a windswept hilltop here, some 35 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

“Drive,” a new drama scheduled to have its premiere on Fox on April 15, portrays a dozen characters who are forced into a race for reasons they don’t understand, sent on a journey from Key West, Fla., to points as yet unknown.

Yet despite the premise of a cross-country race, most of the actors in the new series will rarely get behind the wheel of a car outside the studio. Much of the audience could be none the wiser, thanks to advances in digital special effects that have recently made the leap from feature films to television.

“This could not have been done last year,” said Loni Peristere, a founder of Zoic Studios and a special-effects guru for “Drive.” “We’re able to do this because of advances in hardware, advances in software, advances in technique.”

A recent visit to the set of “Drive” showed the unusual nature of this project. Most of the recording of actors in cars takes place on a specially designed stage that has no sets, just a giant green curtain draped around three-quarters of the inside of the building.

When the actors are behind the wheel of a car, it is likely to be in one perched atop a three-foot-high pedestal that rides on thin bladders filled with compressed air. The apparatus allows the cars to slide easily across the specially coated floor, much like a puck on an air hockey table. A camera mounted on a crane allows the viewer to swoop over the hood of a car and into the front seat, then travel out a side widow and into another car in the race.

“The reason for all this elaborate technical equipment,” said Greg Yaitanes, an executive producer of the series and the director of the pilot episode, “is to achieve what should be a simple effect: moving from car to car while you’re tearing down the road.”

But it is a process that has not been tried before for television, he said. Movie and television fans are used to seeing scenes shot inside a car. From journeys that wind through the Italian hills in “Roman Holiday” to trips down the streets of Manhattan inside Jerry’s car on “Seinfeld,” most of those scenes have been filmed in one of two ways.

In one, a car is placed on a trailer and pulled along the road, as cameras mounted outside the car film the action. In another, a stationary car is placed inside a studio, and the actors are filmed as various backgrounds are placed outside the car or, more recently, street scenes are digitally placed in the car’s windows.

Both of those techniques are fairly easy to spot, because actors riding on a trailer frequently spend little time looking at the road, and - as the film “Airplane!” spoofed so well - placing backgrounds behind cars can look vividly unrealistic.

Now, however, digital effects have advanced to the point where viewers are more often left wondering, “How did they do that?”

In the case of “Drive,” the effects are “a combination of techniques that are out there in different forms,” Mr. Yaitanes said. “People had used the air casters, and some people had used the raising of the cars, and some people had used the crane stuff. But nobody had really put all of the elements together into one sequence like this.”

The use of green-screen technology, where a fake background is electronically substituted for a real one, is not new. Local television weathermen have been using the technique for years, standing in front of a green curtain while pretending to point at a map.

The director Greg Yaitanes, above, left, orchestrates a shot on the set of the new Fox series “Drive,” which often uses green-screen technology in its road sequences.

Movies have made great use of green screens as well, especially in films laden with acrobatic special effects, like “The Matrix” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” where actors are suspended from cables to make them appear to be flying.

But the use of green screens in series television has been limited, mainly because the cheap versions tended to look unconvincing and the good-looking versions were too expensive.

Recently, however, green-screen work has been showing up more often in television series. On “Ugly Betty,” the ABC comedy-drama set at a high-fashion magazine in New York, many of the street scenes near Betty’s home in Queens are shot in Hollywood using green-screen technology. The NBC hit “Heroes” will soon feature on its Web site a behind-the-scenes look at how it produces its special effects.

The inspiration for the race sequences in “Drive,” Mr. Yaitanes said, was a scene from Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” in which Tom Cruise is driving his family on a jammed highway in a minivan. In the scene, the camera darts around and through the car as if it is mounted on the back of a humming bird.

But in the film, the cars that are traveling alongside Mr. Cruise’s minivan are digitally generated. In “Drive,” the surrounding cars needed to be real, because they were carrying actors who were racing against one another, and who would need to interact.

“The rig we would need to accomplish all of this on the actual road would be so elaborate that it wouldn’t even work,” Mr. Yaitanes said. The solution was to record a choreographed race sequence using stunt drivers on the open road.

Then the cars were moved into the studio, where the actors got in. The cars were placed on the pedestals and slid into place on the set, which has a green curtain. A camera on a crane then zoomed along the hood of the car, over its top and around the side, capturing facial expressions, body movements and dialogue.

The two sets of images were then merged, with a seamless jump from real drivers on the road to actors pretending to be drivers in the studio.

For the actors, the process required some mental gymnastics.

Kevin Alejandro, who plays Winston Salazar, who joins the race when he gets out of jail, said he was excited by the prospect of a lead role in a drama about a cross-country auto race. With a love of cars engendered by a father who rebuilt Camaros, he said, he was shocked when the producers told him that he probably would not be doing any road driving.

“It takes a certain kind of concentration and you have to believe in yourself doing it,” he said of the studio driving. “It was intimidating being told I wasn’t going to be able to drive,” particularly because his character has one of the sweeter cars in the race: a low-riding 1964 Chevy Impala.

For all of the high-technology effects going into “Drive,” there can be some rather low-tech moments, as when seven men spent much of two hours pushing two cars around the set, trying to perfect the effect of one car pulling up next to another so the passengers could look at each other across the road.

In one scene, four men pushed a Ford Taurus roughly 50 feet, up next to a Land Rover, which was then pushed back the same distance by a group of three men. They did this for 19 takes before Mr. Yaitanes got the look he wanted.

“Next time you’re in a car going 50 miles an hour, look in the car next to you,” he explained. “Everything’s moving relative to you, so it’s those little movements we’re trying to recreate. So, in the middle of using the cutting-edge technology, just pushing a car across the floor is the best way to do it.”