Yesterday was another fun day at Matt Deal farms. Brandon, Eric, Matt, Nick and myself all busied ourselves about the business of blowing things up. As usual it went wonderfully. Eric had a black powder bomb (see a Hollywood Special Effects book for details) and a precisely measured amount of gasoline, 1.5 gallons in this case. It resulted in a whole heap of flaming fun. Remember kids (and adults!) that any explosion is dangerous and potentially life threatening so please do not attempt this unless you are a trained professional.
Materials
We can skip this, if you don’t know how to make this already, you don’t need to be making it.
Procedure
Detonate using electronic detonation.
Result
A huge fireball! This was filmed with a 25mm which gives you approximately 13.3 degrees fov (field of view). Doesn’t sound like much does it? What this means is that at 100ft the left to right span is around 18ft. The camera was a little more than 100ft from the explosion, this makes the fireball roughly 17ft wide and probably 30-40ft tall, its hard to tell exactly as the fireball was cropped at the top. The fireball itself (including the residual smoke) rose well over the tops of the nearby trees. The trees were all mature Georgia Pines (60-90ft tall). All this to say, it was big! Though the camera didn’t catch it the smoke from the explosion was gorgeous, a nice little mushroom. Eric set this up perfectly, there was not a bit of residual gas around or in the tube. The most interesting thing about this explosion to me is the manner in which the fireball evolves, grasping at the vaporized gas.
Today we look at the secretions from a very large Ungulate in the subfamily Bovinae, of the family of Bovidae. Ok, ok. So it’s milk from a cow, processed milk at that. But somehow one sounds so much stranger and interesting than the other.
Materials
A cow. Or you could save some effort and pick up some in a bottle at the store. I did.
Large transparent container.
Light cube with a black background. The light cube is used to reduce the reflections from the glass container.
Water.
Procedure
Pour the milk into the water filled glass.
Result
Initially the intent was to capture the entire view of the milk but that turned out to be impossible with the lens selection and the light cube I was using. I plan on redoing this shot with better lighting conditions as well as a larger cube. The billowy nature of fluids interacting with one another has always fascinated me and in fact is one of the things that first got me interested in cg fluid simulation. Primarily because creating fluid simulations in CG allows you to slow it down. A high-speed camera can do the same thing…only faster. A fluid simulation done similar to this shot would take on the order of two days or so to simulate. This shot took less than three seconds to film. I’m a big fan of that kind of time savings. The billowing of the milk is neat to watch at any rate.
Today we look at another Diet Coke and Mentos shot. This one I captured only the trailing end of the fountain.
Materials
Diet Coke 2 Liter
5 Mint Mentos
Standard fare of black background material.
Procedure
Drop the 5 Mentos in the Diet Coke and back up quickly.
Result
In this one we get to see a really large spray on its way back down. The spray fanning out and breaking is especially interesting to watch. The strands and globules that rain down shortly before the larger umbrella are a fascinating study in terms of deformation. At any rate, enjoy!
Today we take a look at the SVSi GigaView camera I’ve been using for the past three weeks. My overall impression of this camera is that it is wonderful for just about any purpose you could think of using it for. SVSi has created a feature packed camera that comes at an amazingly low (comparably) price. The system is incredibly easy to setup and is very easy to use. They have put an amazing amount of thought into the software that controls the camera. Let us look at this in more detail.
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.
They were wrong, this is even cooler than I remembered it being!
Materials
A straw.
A glass.
1Tsp of pearl swirl.
Pink food coloring.
Procedure
Once the pearl swirl is mixed, put the straw in the glass and blow.
Result
Bubbles are a lot more fascinating than I ever really figured they would be. Most of the time I think of bubbles I think of these nearly spherical, iridescent bubbles floating through the air. In this instance we have bubbles that are anything but that. I don’t think they are spherical at any point in time in this video. The bubbles collide with and conform to the inside of the glass. The most interesting part about this to me is the splashing of the water inside the bubble. Popping bubbles is expected, but seeing eruptions of water inside a bubble was not. I will probably post a macro (close up) shot of one of this event in the relatively near future, it is awfully neat.
Today we have yet another high-speed shot of a Katana slicing open a balloon.
Materials
A black helium balloon filed with water.
A black background.
A background stand.
Some black invisiline rope.
A Katana.
Procedure
Hang the balloon from the second background stand setup.
From here you must perform the first Iai waza/kata. The first waza is a basic draw (nukitsuke) and cut (kirioroshi) from the lower left to the upper right (temple) followed by chiburi and noto (cleaning and returning the blade). For more information on the wonderful world of Iaido please visit the Japanese Cultural Arts Center.
Result
This shot turned out rather nicely. My cut was horrible, but the shot is pretty. It is most interesting if one compares the previous shot to this one and notices the similarities of the effect the blade has on the movement of the water. In both cases we see a clear deviation of the water caused by the blade. Even in this case where the blade penetrates no more than a half of an inch (it should have penetrated 3/4″). The shutter speed has reduced the motion blur sufficiently enough to allow all of this to be quite clear. I am awfully fond of this camera. Speaking of, I will be posting the review of this camera around the middle of this week.
Lighting
For this shot I decided on a backlight for the water. In this case it is the sun. This allows for nice, clear viewing of the droplets without an overly bright highlight.
