We did a LOT of fire effects on Outer Range Season 2, and I’ve actually written about most of them from earlier posts, I just didn’t announce what project I was on.  The particular effect I’d like to tell you about today was part of the season finale.  I won’t tell you who, why or even what building in case you haven’t yet seen it.  A large building sets fire Season 2, Ep 7 at 11:56 in, and a character exits a burning building for a very brief exterior shot.  This was a fun moment to program, so I’d like to share how it happened.

I was sent ahead with the directive from my Gaffer (the brilliant Jay Kemp) to make a huge and terrifying fire.  The rig consisted of 98 Titan tubes on a Magni in 4 pixel mode, 96 incandescent Par 56 bulbs in Maxi Brute arrays sprinkled around on the inside plus a bunch of Vortex 8 fixtures in 8 pixel mode on the interior and exterior.  I started with a wave form I like for LED based fires, which is a “stock” wave form in Eos that I modified so it only goes down instead of up.

I assigned the effect to the pixels only of the Magni Titans in a Submaster. Having the effect only on the pixels means the Master intensity can fade in and out without changing the proportions of the effect.  I created a separate wave form for the incandescent fixtures because I knew their responsiveness would be very different from the LEDs. (For those who don’t know, this is because incandescents are all heat sources, and therefor you have to wait for them to heat up or cool down to see a level change.) The effect wave form was an exact duplicate of the Magni Titan wave form, but having it separated meant I could change them independently.  I put the Vortexes onto another handle because they are inside, and I anticipated needing to have those on an earlier timeline since the fire starts inside.

After messing with the effect for a while, it was a satisfying roar.  Since I had some time before my Gaffer joined me, I created a series of zone-based inhibitor subs.  One for the Magni, one for the interior Vortex units, one for the interior incandescent lamps and one for ther exterior ground units.

Jay showed up, I showed the effects, and after tweaking things a bit, he was pleased.  Roaring fire was achieved.  This was great till we showed it to the DP, who wanted the fire to start earlier (so, not roaring) and progress to medium-roaring-housefire.  Specifically, he wanted all of the Titans to start in a CCT, then half of them to run the effect and get brighter at the same time.  Because Eos has channel filtering for any playback, this was actually easy to accomplish.  If you’re not an Eos programmer, you could have (for example) every light in the rig in a submaster in a blazing fire.  Once you apply a channel filter onto the sub- all the data remains- but the only data that can play back is whatever channels you have filtered to.  So I made a new group of every other Titan tube and applied it to the effect submaster and was ready to go in about a minute. 

I had a background cue with all of the “pre-fire” data, and then a few fire effect handles I faded up per Jay and the DP’s instructions to suit any shot.  As the camera bounced around, I often used the inhibitors to cut away from things to help them.  All said, a rather successful evening of programming for me.  Relatively smooth, and most important- production never waited for us.  

What fun effects have you enjoyed programming?  Bonus points if they were challenging for you!  Hit me in the comments.

Featured Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash