This is your jello. This is your jello being impacted by a lighter….any questions?
Materials
Gelatin, Lighter.
Procedure
Place the jello on a background of some kind, drop a lighter from roughly 1′.
Result
Sproing!?
Observations
This shot turned out better than I was hoping. The wave can actually be seen traveling all the way around the outer edge of the gelatin. The caustics (the light passing through the gel and reflecting on the background) are especially neat to watch as the jello is distorted.
Lighting
A thing to note about using these high powered flashlights as lighting solutions. If you have a better alternative make sure to use it. The main problem with these lights is that you lose almost all color in the image. In the above image one would say it is hard to tell, clear jello, black lighter. The background is chroma key blue, which does not come across at all in the final image. I’ve color shifted the piece for artistic reasons (to get away from the reds produced by the halogen and to cool it down) but the original image was almost entirely devoid of color. When it comes to lighting for high-speed filming it goes without saying that you need a ton of light. Especially if you are filming at 2000fps, since your minimum shutter will be set at 1/2000th and possibly much higher than that. Daylight is by far the best thing you can use. I’ll be posting a more informative article on lighting sometime in the future. I would like to get a hold of a large assortments of lights so I can film the same event with different lighting conditions to really demonstrate the differences. Lighting makes all the difference in filming, and makes even more of a difference with high-speed.
Today we look at that pseudo-jello I made being shot with a bb.
Materials
Jello
Spring powered bb gun.
White poster board.
Procedure
Place a square of jello on the board and then shoot it.
Result
The ripples coming off of the impact are fascinating to watch. The Jello is, amazingly, dense enough to catch and stop the bb in roughly 1/4″. It really is no wonder this jello was terrible to eat. It takes an incredibly long time (relatively) for the jello to stop jiggling. I will leave the rest of the observation as an exercise for the class as I am a tad short on time today. We have been working on some really neat stuff that I hope to be posting soon, but first I must run out and pick up some more gun powder.
I had this post all nice and written up and then BAM!!! The server went down as I am clicking save. Fantastic. So now, here I am again. Trying to remember what all I said. Blech. Today we have a shot that comes from our Shot Suggestion page. Danger suggested that we do one of the classic Jello drop shots. Having never made Jello before this sounded like fun. Who can mess up Jello right? Well apparently I can, which comes as no surprise to me. In my cooking career I have managed to burn water…come to think of it, I have made Jello! Well…sort of. I left a pot of Ramen on the stove on high for 45minutes or so once, that very closely resembled Jello. Suffice it to say, I did actually manage to make something that looked and sort of reacted like Jello. It was foul though. After two days on the counter it was only a few degrees warmer than it was when I removed it from the fridge. I keep my house at a pleasant 78 degrees, no doubt you understand the anomaly. Anyway, on with the show!
Materials
In this instance I made my own Jello using unflavored gelatin mixed with Crystal Light Raspberry Ice. The Raspberry Ice by itself is wonderful, both in color and flavor. The Jello made with it is not fit for consumption. Period.
Procedure
Drop a 2″ cube of Jello like substance from approx 24″.
Result
This responds very much the Jello it isn’t. Though it does appear to be of a higher consistency than your standard Jello as you will note that it returns to its pre-drop shape. It is an incredibly firm Jello. I shot it with a spring powered, plastic BB airsoft gun to see how far it would penetrate. Approx 1/2 – 1/4″. This stuff is more like ballistics gelatin than Jello. It has a wonderful color and the light transmission is beautiful. This is an excellent video to step through a frame at a time as there is a lot that is going on. Considering the lighting conditions, with a different lens I could have cranked the shutter up enough to remove the motion blur. At 1/1000th of a second on the shutter you still get a bit too much motion blur. I think 1/5000th with a f/2.8 lens would have been more appropriate. I’ll try this again in the future, hopefully with a better tasting Jello.
Lens
A note on the lens I used for this shot. The lens is a StarBright? 75-200mm f/4.5-32 lens I just received from e-bay. The appature control however is broken and I am not certain at what value it is stuck at. As such you will note that the f/stop field will always list this lens at ‘f/4.5-32?’. I believe it is stuck wide open at f/4.5 but I am not 100% certain of that.
