How to burn a house down. Without burning the house down.

[Kim Frank]

I personally would skip the CGI and Compositing although I could do it, but IMO you don't need to see flames. You said it yourself: a lot of smoke through the windows and different CTO gelled light in dimmers or the crew moving flags in front of them and/or rotating on the stand that flicker an light up the smoke will look like it's burning and no one would miss some flames. There's the scene in FIGHT CLUB where his appartment is burning, that they shot with that method, and I once saw ,what I think was a Fire Department training in the city but it also could have been a movie set and it took even in real life a few minutes to realize that it was just smoke and lights.

 

[Brent J. Craig]

If you end up shooting miniatures, besides adjusting the framerate as suggested, you can use a fan on the flames to make them smaller and more violent, thus scaling better.

 

[Dan Hudgins]

Orange light on smoke

Orange light on smoke

a lot of smoke through the windows and different CTO gelled light in dimmers or the crew moving flags in front of them and/or rotating on the stand that flicker an light up the smoke will look like it's burning and no one would miss some flames.

The term "Hanging Miniatures" does not mean they are small, its just an FX term, they can be any size, they were used a lot before for ceiling replacement etc, where a glass painting would not work but a 3D model would, but model can be 4/5 or 3/4 etc as was mentioned.

One thing that came to mind from the above quote is that you could put gel filter wheels in front of 20ks pointing OUT the windows into the smoke that is going out the windows, and the camera would pick up the orange-to-red-to-yellow light reflected OFF the smoke.

Flames could be added later, but in real fires most of the orange light would be INSIDE the house, and blocked by carbonized parts of the house, what would show is the orange light illuminating smoke as it goes out the windows.

You just need to get the angle of the lights inside right so that it does not look like a spotlight on the smoke, but like light from all over on the inside rooms...

It would be hard to have crew inside doing the flicker (hence my suggestion of filter wheels plus external power controls) with thick smoke, and the lamps and fans would get covered in soot, and if you were not careful with all that light inside the house might just catch fire for real...

The time of day will impact if you can pick up the orange light at all though, maybe best to cheat the time of day?

 

[Vladimir Cassel]

Speaking of filming miniatures, can anyone recommend a budget focusing rail for dealing with parallax in panning shots? I was looking at this one - http://www.amazon.com/Janco-Focusin...2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1283561164&sr=8-2

 

[Dan Hudgins]

Nodal point head?

Nodal point head?

dealing with parallax in panning shots?

I think you want a Nodal point head for tilt and pan without parallax (provided you do not focus the lens).

If you just need to Nodal for pan, you can slide the camera back on the balance plate dovetail.

For tilt, you need a special head with the axis up where the lens is.

http://www.nodalninja.com/

That link shows a very simple version.

Here is how to find the Nodal point, you can just pan and tilt and move the camera so the lens is near the point of rotation in both axis until there is no movement in the image due to parallax,

http://www.rosaurophotography.com/html/technical7.html

I would think a rectailinear Double Gauss lens would be easer to use for that than a retrofocus or zoom?

http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/2114189

Here are some videos on the subject,

http://www.google.com/search?q=noda...esult_group&ct=title&resnum=7&ved=0CDQQqwQwBg

http://www.red-door.co.uk/pages/productpages/nodal-ninja-parallax-nodal-point.html

 

[Vladimir Cassel]

Thanks! That gives me a lot to chew on. I went to school for computer animation, but since watching the special features of Moon I've had an itching to play with miniatures. I'm going to try a panning shot of a crashed plane on my street. Might even composite some FumeFX stuff into it.

 

[Dan Hudgins]

Move the camera not the lens...

Move the camera not the lens...

Thanks! That gives me a lot to chew on. I went to school for computer animation, but since watching the special features of Moon I've had an itching to play with miniatures. I'm going to try a panning shot of a crashed plane on my street. Might even composite some FumeFX stuff into it.

Yea, I have a VistaVision camera that was used for some kind of work where the lens had to stay on the nodal point, and the camera body moved in and out on rails with stepper motors for focus.

That sort of rig could be made for DSLR or RED ONE, you just need to replace the lens mount with a ring that is mounted on a plate, and the camera sets on a kind of track sled. Once the lens is set on the nodal point of the pan/tilt then you can rack focus to keep the model sharp without getting any parallax, although the background will change, but if the background is just black or a green screen it does not matter much.

That's why with Hanging Miniatures you want the model large so the background and model can be within the DOF at maybe f/22 or f/32. Smaller than f/32 things will go quite soft even if you sharpen the frames.

In 2001 they shot 65mm with the lens at like f/45 I think in some of the Moon shots, and the perspective was forced with the background art being closer to the camera so that the model would hold focus better. I think I read someting about their taking the f/ ring stops out of the lenses so they could force the iris a bit more closed or something like that...

With this fire shot, having the lens at f/22 plus ND in daylight would make it hard to get enough light inside the house full size to light the windows up, but in a 1/2 size model the same watts of light would look maybe 4x as bright on the recorded images because the AREA would be 1/4 as large, so the light is more concentrated.....

 

[Craig Ryan]

24 times the square root of the relative scale (size of the original/size of the miniature). For example, a 1/10 scale miniature would usually be shot at about 3.2*24fps, or about 76fps, to achieve "normal" motion.

Cool, thanks!