The all-consuming flame

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Consider this:

 

 

We had him do it twice, and the first time I lost most of the fire in the white-out. Stopping down, I now have the background about a stop or a stop and a half under, while the fire looks great. Unfortunately I just wasn't able to relight due to time and availability of the chef to perform the trick many times in a row. I'm not that depressed with it, and the high shutter speed makes the flame look decent in still, but it's a flawed image. On the other hand, with a brighter backdrop, the flame might have looked more transparent.

 

Opinions?

 

Phil

[J. Lamar King IMPOSTOR]

If that was the only way to make the flame look good I would have went that way myself. The simplest thing you could have done to improve it would be strong backlight to seperate the guy from the back ground. If you had a tweenie or something similar you could have had somebody hold it up behind him.

[Michael Nash]

Personally I've never been bothered by losing a little of the flame to white-out in a flash like that. For one thing, if you expose for the face you catch a little orange glow on the face while losing a little detail in the flame itself, which can make the whole thing seem hotter and more dramatic. But with video it's often a fine line since there's so little margin for overexposure.

 

A good second-unit trick I've learned whenever you're going to be doing highspeed or explosions is to light your main setup with a double scrim in each light. Then when it comes time to add one more stop for higher frame rates, all you do is pull the scrims while retaining all the other nuances of the lighting you've setup.

 

Another trick you could experiment with in video is turning up the knee saturation. Under normal conditions this produces ugly and garish color to the highlights, but in this case it would put a little orange back into the flame.

 

If you're concerned about losing the flame against a brighter background, you could use a little color to create contrast instead. A slight blue to the background would offset the orange while being closer to a normal exposure.