Water Reflection Gag

[Arnold F.]

I wish to shoot talent with dancing water reflections on them. I'm about to start some tests and am wondering if anyone here has done this bit and, if so, how you went about it.

 

[Bob Gundu]

A pan of water with a few pieces of broken mirrors at the bottom, and bounce some light on it.

 

[RobMNeilson]

A long long time ago I used some gel sheets that a PA would "flutter" to reflect light on a face in CU. You can also do it with flexible mirror sheets as well.

 

[Julio Quintana]

A pan of water with a few pieces of broken mirrors at the bottom, and bounce some light on it.

Yep.

 

[Arnold F.]

Thank you. That was more or less the first thing I was going to test. Specifically, I was going to get a wide, shallow, clear plastic storage bin (of the kind one might use to store clothes under a bed) and line the bottom with foil and try that.

A pan of water with a few pieces of broken mirrors at the bottom, and bounce some light on it.

 

[Michael Frymus]

When I was shooting a TV show, I set up an HMI up high and had a 4x4' diffusion in front of it. I believe it was Opal. It was thin.
The diffusion was very loose on the frame, in the wind it was flopping around a bit. With the frame a few feet away from the light, the light was bouncing off the diffusion and creating that water effect behind the light.
It looked really sick! And just like water reflections

 

[Joshua Raven]

Hi Arnold, I've tried it both ways and the mirror is much better than the foil. Mirror in the bottom of the storage bin, bounce the light, shake the bin and you'll get some nice caustic light effect.

 

[PatrickFaith]

There was a perty huge thread on this on cinematography.org , lean was to the mirror in the water, but there were a lot of other techniques that were more studio friendly. For example the scene in blade runner did not use reflected water as much as it used some type of moving foil.