INTEGRATION: FIRE PART 1

This ongoing study is a look what makes fire sit well into a scene and what properties of it I still need to know to better understand it and use it convincingly. There is a long way to go, but this was a fun start. A lot of my assumptions were not on target, and I learned a lot!

SHADOWS

Shadows aren’t the first thing that come to mind when I think of fires, so surprisingly to me, the more I studied shots with practical fires, the more I saw fire in sunlit scenes cast shadow. Fire itself needs a light source stronger than itself to cast a shadow, but more often than not it seems like the smoke from the fire casts a shadow mixed with the fire:

Return of the Jedi:

“National Geographic: The Greeks”:

License To Kill:

SMOKE COLOR

Smoke color was something I never thought too deeply about - I thought all smoke from fires was black. But it never clicked, even when I looked at images from the 2020 fires. The following pictures of smoke and the description of smoke colors come from the link below:

https://www.redzone.co/2016/01/23/smoke-color-can-depict-fuel-type/

Smoke is the biproduct of the fuels it is burning.  The color of the smoke indicates to firefighters the type and density of the fuels involved, all of which gives hints as to what the fire might do next.

White smoke can often mean material is off-gassing moisture and water vapor, meaning the fire is just starting to consume material. White smoke can also indicate light and flashy fuels such as grass or twigs.

Thick, black smoke indicates heavy fuels that are not being fully consumed. At times, black smoke can be an indicator that a manmade material is burning such as tires, vehicles or a structure. As a general rule, the darker the smoke, the more volatile the fire is.

Grey smoke can indicate that the fire is slowing down and running out of materials to burn.

Examples of grey and black smoke in Django Unchained:

EXPOSURE

One of the most important aspects of fire I learned at ILM was knowing how to expose fire - how bright or dark should it be during different lighting scenarios. Below are two examples of literal day and night comparisons:

“National Geographic: The Greeks”:

Django Unchained: