INTEGRATION: FIRE PART 2

COLOR

This part of the study started off wondering why some of the fires in James Bond movies and classic Star Wars movies looked different from majority of the fires I’ve seen in movies and real life.

I’ve recently learned that fire can burn wildly different colors depending on the chemical source. This offered a much needed answer to my quandary and got me excited to dig deeper:

Differently colored flames was most apparent to me in The World Is Not Enough. The large amount of blues in the fire gives me the impression that the source of the fire must be unique to most fires I’ve seen.

Below from is an example from The Phantom Menace and one maybe one of my favorite explosions that strikes me as the most realistic or visually interesting for its variation:
- pink initial burst
- blue lens flare
- greenish/yellow flames

This newly learned information for me got me very excited particularly because it helped explain something about A New Hope I’ve wondered for months: why are most of the sparks pink? I used to think it was mostly the film transfer, but there is fire the color of standard orange fire in the film - so I must assume that they burned different materials to get the pink explosions and separate older Star Wars movies with a distinct look.

The pink explosion in The Phantom Menace:

Two examples of pink explosions in A New Hope:

Another way to add color variation is with sparks. In the clip below from The World Is Not Enough, notice how blue the sparks emit - they could be close to white, but blue from the lens flare coating, but nevertheless look boldly blue before cooling to orange .

In the two clips below from The World Is Not Enough and Goldeneye, respectively, see how the fires get a warm/cool color mix from both warm fire and blue sparks: