Exposing big fires.

[Adam Frisch FSF]

Hi, guys.

 

I'm doing a music video with some big fires in them - one is a car burning, for instance, the rest is gasoline bombs and fuel drums burning. I have some experience with exposing for fire, but not very much, so I need your help.

 

I'm basically aiming for a T4 on 200 speed film or a T5.6 on 500 speed to get those bright yellow/red fireballs. Would you agree this was in the ballpark in your experience, or should I go even further? Suggestions welcome on this subject.

 

I also was wondering - would a Polarizer do anything to fire? Can't remember hearing or reading about it, so probably not...

[Guest fstop]

fire always looks best IMO detailed at f8, which I believe Mikael Salamon went for on Backdraft or else it always ends up with too much overexposed white. John Pardue a commercials DP discussed this on the article written about his work on The Bunker.

 

I like to see the smoke and all the detail like this against sillouhettes with COLOUR (talking red and orange):

 

 

as oppose to this with the actors exposed but the flames virtually white and neon yellow (the flames on this have been shot at wider fstop and photoshopped in to the flash photogrpahy):

 

 

The ending to Beverly Hills Cop 2 lit by Kimball always irks me, because there is a shot of an exploding and burning car that must be shot at f2.8-4 and while it's shallow focus, all the flames are just unnaturally yellow with a huge white burn out in the middle that makes it look as though it's clipped SVHS. Blugh...

Edited December 17, 2004 by fstop

[Wendell_Greene]

To add to F-stop's post you may find this excerpt from the January 2003 AC interesting:

 

"Ballhaus filmed most of ["Gangs of New York"] night scenes on Kodak Vision 500T 5279, but for one significant night scene, in which Vallon saves the life of another young Irishman (Henry Thomas) during a house fire, the cinematographer used a method that he and his gaffer, Jim Tynes, had read about in AC.:

 

"I wanted the flames to be really rich and red rather than white, " Ballhaus says. "We remembered the American Cinematographer story about Mikael Salomon?s work on "Backdraft" [May ?91] and decided to try his idea, which was to shoot fire on daylight stock and light it with HMIs."

 

"The HMIs were pretty large because we wanted to get the fill level up," Tynes explains. "The idea is to bring the base level up to a pretty high f-stop, allowing you to stop the lens down and prevent the fire tones from bleaching out into the white spectrum.

 

We used as much firepower as we could get, several 18Ks and 12K Pars, which we positioned behind the camera and used as high bounces with 20-bys and 12-bys to create overall ambience.

 

We also had some tungsten units motivated from the building illuminating the scene."

 

Adds Ballhaus, "We shot the scene on 5245, and I used a fairly high stop, T5.6 or T8, to get strong colors. It worked wonderfully."

[Justin Hayward]

Is it going to be shot at night or at day? If day, you?re probably going to be limited to whatever your daylight stop is. Usually the fire is a little underexposed.

 

If night, (personally, I don?t mind if it goes white in the middle) but the proper exposure is probably around an 8 on a 500T stock (although proper exposure is pretty subjective).

 

The last time I shot something like this, I shot a few tests of the fire and decided the exposure for everything else accordingly.

[DavidSloan]

This is a really interesting thread...I'm going back to view all the films that I know have fire in them :D

[Mike Brennan]

Yes flames are bright, you can even see them in daylight!

 

For night scenes light accordingly.

 

 

 

Mike Brennan

[Adam Frisch FSF]

Thanks for the input.

 

It's at night. T8 on 5245 sounds excessive, but hey, if Salomon and Ballhaus can do it then maybe I can? Although the shot you posted fstop, is probably a bit too underexposed for my

taste...

 

The HMI thing sounds interesting except for the fact that I dislike such disparity on color temperature - a face lit with a HMI is about 5600K and the fire is about 2700K or something.

Doesn't sound like it's going to look good to my ears, but I guess I can always filter the HMI's a bit...

[Mike Brennan]

Thanks for the input.

 

It's at night. T8 on 5245 sounds excessive, but hey, if Salomon and Ballhaus can do it then maybe I can? Although the shot you posted fstop, is probably a bit too underexposed for my

taste...

 

The HMI thing sounds interesting except for the fact that I dislike such disparity on color temperature - a face lit with a HMI is about 5600K and the fire is about 2700K or something.

Doesn't sound like it's going to look good to my ears, but I guess I can always filter the HMI's a bit...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Consider that most daylight scenes of bushfires, explosions in films has the same colour temperature difference between flame and ambient light.

 

Shoot the closeup 1 1/2 stops down on the wide shot if you are struggling to light the aera. Assuming there is action before the explosion it needs to be lit to within a few stops of the explosion.

You can trade less ambient light for larger illumination of the area around the explosion by the explosion itself.

Do a second/third take of the explosion , low high or wide angles, reflected image, framed by forground ect you'll probably get away with it in a fast cut.

 

Plan a test with a video camera on the night. If you are UK based drop me a line I'll pop over with a f900 and slo mo rig always looking for stock footage opportunities:)

 

Mike Brennan

[Stephan Schuh]

Hi!

 

If you shoot wide open or stop down for fire is a question of taste. If you stop down a lot, you will loose all the light from the fire, but you will get nice red flames. I´ve seen a night-scene in a war movie, that was entirely lit by the explosions and flames and it looked great, despite all the flames being white.

 

Sometimes I use a simple solution for explosions, if you want to break them down into different shots: The close shot on a long lens is stopped down, most of the time on slow mo, to get a really red fireball. The wide shot is on a rather open lens, so I get all the light and reflections from the fireball, which is white in the center. But that is O.K., because it is only a small part of the frame anyway. If you put too much light on a night shot with fire, it might look like a bad day for night shot. As far as I remember, "Gangs of New York" looked pretty artificial. (Nevertheless I am a Ballhaus-Fan).

 

<_< I doubt that you get stronger reds by shooting on daylight-stock. Fire is already as red as an adittional full orange gel on a tungsten lamp. So it reads red on tungsten film already, you can still warm it up in the grading. Í´ve shot a test with flames with and without a choclate filter, and there was hardly difference in color visible. It can´t get more red than red.

 

Merry Christmas from Germany!

Schuh