NOTE: This cut (#28) is a follow up to cut number 25. As such, the build for this set is the same. I have repeated the build information here for the sake of thoroughness but if you have already read this section, you can jump down directly to the explosion info by clicking HERE.
Began
cut number 28, which is a distant shot of the laser being bounced back
to an old ship and blowing up.
Brandi
starts by scoring and cutting black foam core to the desire shap. She then
hot melt glues it around a form.
The bow
of the ship has a distinctive shape. Brandi carved a piece of balsa wood
following the general look of the original cartoon.
The final
ship, awaiting paint.
After
adding a touch of seaweed and some masts, the boat goes before the camera.
The
boat was placed on a sheet of black acrylic to get a natural, dark reflection.
Rigging,
sails, seaweed, etc were added via a digital matte painting in Photoshop.
(Click
on the picture for a larger view.)
To create a firey explosion on a budget, I employed the old school cloud tank method.
In this
set up, you can see two HD cameras in the foreground. One points directly
at the tank and the other points down at a first surface mirror, which
allows a view pointed directly up through the bottom of the tank. The up
view is really all that we want but I set up the second camera to record
the side view just for future use on other projects. Note the side lighting
and the black background. Also note the reflections of the tripods in the
glass, which required that we cover them in black tape!
A shot
glass of milk is used to create the explosion and delivery of the pour
must be hyper accurate. Reflections of the ceiling must also be avoided.
So a black foam core top for the tank is employed with a hole in the middle
for a funnel to direct the entry of the milk.
Here
Brandi cleans the tank to an inch of its life. All water spots and debris
must be removed. Creating cloud tank explosions is not an exact science
and we probably spent about 4 hours to get 2 viable takes out of probably
half a dozen attempts. The tank had to be drained and polished cleaned
after every shot.
A rather atmospheric shot of me filling the tank for the umpteenth time. The local water supply had quite a bit of calcium in it so Brandi was constantly pissed off at having to reach in the tank with her bare arms to nit-pick tiny calcium deposits swirling about after she had already scrubbed the tank spotless clean. Getting them out took longer than the actual shot!
Click
HERE
to see the raw shot of the cloud tank!
This
is what an original frame looked like. The milk was heated in a microwave
to just near boiling. The water in the tank was cold. Since heat rises,
the milk pretty much stopped in its tracks after it was poured into the
cold water. This made it collect in one area instead of shooting to the
bottom of the tank. It also kept the milk from simply dissipating into
the surrounding water. In the past, I have also added red and yellow food
coloring but, in this instance, I just tinted the cloud orangish in post.
To add
some "punch" to the shot, I hand animated a shock wave that spreads out
ahead of the explosion. I also animated the breakup of the old ship into
pieces that fell away into the water and also toward the camera.
And this
is what they look like combined with overlaid debris. I cranked up the
contrast to introduce some grain into the cloud to make it less smooth
and also gave it a firey orange/red tint. The video was shot at 30 frames
per second progressive. I then increased the speed of the raw shot 600%
by skipping frames. This was then sandwiched between the background ship/shockwave
and the foreground debris.
Click
on the picture for a larger view.
The final
clip is at the top of the page!
Thanks
for looking!
All information, videos, photos and graphics in
this website are copyright 2009, Roger Evans. All rights reserved.
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