Blowing Stuff Up

Kurosawa89

Kurosawa89

Hey guys,

I just finished principal photography on my second feature film and I realized that I really want to blow up this one location. Here's the situation:

Guy in garage gets gasoline dumped on him and set on fire in his car.

Here are the problems:

1. It's my buddy's garage so there's no way we're actually going to blow it up.

2. I'm old school and don't like using CG unless I absolutely need to.

3. We're a low budget film so we can't get too excessive.

I thought about building a model replica of the garage and blowing it up that way. Problem is I live in Colorado and they won't let you buy fireworks unless you have an out of state driver's license. Would fireworks really be the best way to do this, anyway? I really need some suggestions on this, thanks.
 
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Kurosawa89 said:
2. I'm old school and don't like using CG unless I absolutely need to.
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Your answer is not CG, but compositing (via After Effects, Motion, Sony Vegas, etc.) real elements for your effect. Show a shot of the garage. Get another shot of the sky (plate shot), so that when you comp in the explosion, smoke, debris elements, part of the garage can blow away, revealing the sky. It's pretty easy to do (and can look awesome), if you have any idea of how to create a mask. Det Films supplies all the comp elements for a reasonable price. They blow up stuff for a living.
 
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Sweetie said:
Considered using the power of suggestion?
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You're probably right, so I removed the first part of what I said. Being that comping is the best answer, I wasn't suggesting that as much as pointing out that, you don't have to leave the state to find over the counter items. This guy was actually thinking about using fireworks.... Then again, when I was a young filmmaker, I put M-80's inside Rubik's Cubes, used bottle rockets for tracer gunfire, ground up Estes rocket engines for poofs of spark and smoke. The problem is these don't look as good as what you can do with the Det Films, Action Essentials elements.

These days, I generally use a fog machine (to simulate smoke) and comped elements. On set fog/smoke helps blend the illusion. When I need to go practical, I've got a great pyro guy, who is licensed to handle what he does. I'm chuckling about the fireworks' idea, because I've done some of that and it doesn't always look that great. In this case, the scale of the miniature garage would not match the smoke and sparks. It won't look good. The only way to make a model look good is to build it large enough and use slow motion to add weight/adjusted speed to the explosion and flying parts.

Bottom line: the Det Films stuff will look great and be perfectly safe and legal.
 
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Kurosawa89 said:
Scoopicman,

How would I accomplish this in Vegas?
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I would use DetfilmsHD, NCcinema.ch or Action Essentials elements in After Effects. If you can't do that yourself, there are several people in your area who can. Fireworks won't look that great with a miniature. We used them years ago, because the brilliant comp effects, available now, didn't exist. Trust me, I have access to fireworks, but I would not use them this way.

If you are dead set on practical effects, you need to hire a licensed pyro technician.
 
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Kurosawa89 said:
Since I don't have After Effects, I'd rather pay someone and get what I really want so I'll go with the pyro technician. Thanks.
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I think what scoopicman was saying is that what you think you want and what you really want might differ a lot. Pyrotechnics on a model gives you one shot, and it needs to look good, but pyrotechnics on a small model tends to look like a small model just got blown up (due to the size of the sparks and such not being scaled to the size of the model).

If you're going to hire someone to make it look realistic, hire someone to do the post who does have the software and aftereffects and knows how to use it.

I guess I realize the cool feeling of doing it all using real and practical stuff and it can really give a feel to the film, but unless that's the purpose of the film, don't let it get in the way of telling the story you want to do.

You are shooting on film, right? Because digital is all fakery, and not old school at all. If you're shooting digital, you might consider that you've already headed down the slippery slope. :)
 
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