Fire effects panel

[Ronald Gerald Smith]

Hi, I am aware that a lot of cinematographers and gaffers build their own fire effects unit out of a wooden panel with a bunch of household bulb sockets and some device to turn bulbs on and off. How would I get started on building one of these?

 

[ian dart]

hi ronald,

it is probably easier to hire a magic gadgets "flicka box" when you need it.

cheers

 

[craigbowman]

What's a "flicka box"?

Just kidding...

 

[slondon]

A great fire effect is hard to come by because firelight changes in intensity and it moves side to side and up and down.

Most realistic and hardest to manage is a real fire. You have to keep it consistent and it's potentially dangerous. You reflect it from a close by silver or gold lame bounce board and you wriggle the board.

Most convenient is a Magic Gadgets or GAM fire effects generator. One works but two (you can get a three channel one) work better. They handle up to 2K incandescent loads. If you have one flicker box you gel one light quite warm and use a dimmer to adjust it for a constant level and you put another light through the box and gel it maybe orange or even red and adjust flicker and intensity for a reasonable look.

I recently worked with an ASC DP who used a real fire and a propane fire ring as an in frame practical but who also put a 2K fresnel in a softbox and used a flicker box on it to augment the real fire. The gag worked well.

The cheapest is to use one or two fixtures gelled with two different warm colors and use your hands or a couple of grips' hands to wave up and down and vary the light.

An inexpensive DIY solution for lamps up to 100W or so is to wire a fluorescent starter in series with the bulb. You can buy one cheap, <$40, from a contributor here, Walter Graff, at bluesky-web.com. You can find plans for these things by googling around for fire flicker and checking out spook alley and Halloween sites. You can even buy electronic flicker circuits from some suppliers for this market and use them as a base for your own fancy flicker box. A board that can handle up to 500W might cost $40. You still have to put it in a box with sockets, a heat sink, wire it up, etc. I've even seen one DIY project that used a flickering neon bulb in the box with a photosensor that in turn drove a dimmer circuit that could handle considerable power. You just have to know where to look -- horror stuff.

I haven't tried it but supposedly you can put two SCR dimmers in series and find a sweet spot for both controls that will give you a flicker.

I think there is a brief description in one edition of Harry Box of a circular board with enclosed mercury switches on it that you can rock around and they are in turn connected to two or three gelled incandescents to get the effect. Too much trouble compared to the above solutions.

I'm going to buy a three channel lighting effects box but for now I use two gelled lamps, two dimmers and two PAs or grips to run the gag. Looks okay.

You DO NOT want to use a system that has open, exposed contacts with 120V on them, although this could be made to work, as it is an electrocution waiting to happen.

That's more than I know about this subject but I've googled the hell out of it more than once. Cinematography.com for fire effect, flicker and fire gag are good. You'll get plenty of hits for TV gags too.

 

[Ronald Gerald Smith]

Awesome slondon, great post. That really sums it up and your techniques are very similar to how David Mullen describes it. I found both yours and David very useful and I think I have a good idea of what I want to be doing.

Quote by David Mullen, ASC from reduser.net

"It's always a stylistic cheat; I would get beyond that to some extent. But if you study a real fire, you generally have a base level of output that varies to some small extent plus momentary jumps as flames flare up & die. So basically you want a slow, minimal dimming up & down of level from your fake campire that has enough randomness to it, plus the occasional fast flicker, again random.

It also depends on how large a fire you are simulating.

My favorite technique is very low-tech: put a couple of small orange gelled lights behind a light diffusion frame (to blend them a bit) and then wave your hands, fingers, whatever, in a dancing, random pattern between the lights and the diffusion. The first time I did this was on a student film: I had a 2K zip off-camera gelled full orange and someone wiggled their fingers in front of the light to create a torchlight effect. It was totally believable. I've improved the effect by having a second person running a dimmer of some sort (like a Variac) for the slow pulsing effect as the first person does the hand dance in front of the lights. But given that some people aren't good at this, plus it can be distracting for the actors to have someone in their line of sight waving their hands all about (I once had David Arquette laughing during a scene where he was supposed to be watching a TV set, which was lighting his face: seeing me sit in front of a blue Kinoflo waving my hands around like a bad performance art piece was too amusing for him...) the other choice is to go with a flicker box. So I might have two lights through the same frame of light diffusion, one on a dimmer and one on a flicker box. Or more than two, one perhaps not dimming at all for the base exposure, or multiple ones on dimmers. It's the randomness of tempo and level that is the more important, to not get into a regular pulsing pattern.

Another technique that Conrad Hall liked was to shine an orange-gelled hard light through an actual fire with a lot of smoke: the rising smoke causes the light shining through it to flicker.

Probably the best approach (besides just using real fire) is to do what Alan Daviau did on "Empire of the Sun" which is to blend the light from a flame bar with some orange-gelled light coming through the fire.

But assuming that you can't use real flames, then I think the idea of blending a dimming light with a randomly flickering light is the best, unless you have some skills at waving your hands and fingers in front of a light in a dancing pattern."

 

[slondon]

It's gratifying to be mentioned in the same breath with David Mullen even when I know he's an 18K and I'm a pepper

 

[Michael Carter]

I got a really effective "fire light" look on a set where we weren't planning to need it at all, totally unprepared.

Took a popup reflector, "un-popped", silver side - made a "squishy" foil circle about 12" wide;

Used it to bounce a 750 fresnel with a warm gel at the talent, while a grip twisted & futzed with the popup. Shot establishing shots "through" the fire, or with the fire in-frame. Totally sold the gag.

That's something you could easily test - all you need's a dark room, you likely have everything else.

 

[Jon Starr]

I did the dimmer effect as well. Mind you this was for a match burning a piece of paper. Just one light with orange gel and heavy diffusion, then flicker it to match a flame. Very believable. For a bigger fire the two or three lights with dimmer on one diffusion sheet sounds very easy and believable.