The Fire Diamond (Patreon)

Hey Patreon weirdos! I was digging through some files yesterday for who knows what and I came across these old images I had taken while creating the setup for The Fire Diamond, as seen in Visions in Fire.

Wherever possible, I like to achieve effects "in camera", using images shot with a photography camera, or in this case, a digital film camera like the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. The BMPCC has a wonderful tiny proprietary sensor in it that measures just 16mm diagonally, and it produces a rather soft and very filmic image, in my opinion, at just 1080p. They're outdated by today's excessive standards, and they are quirky - Shooting literally up to 30 dng files per second, writing to only a very specific kind of SD card (which often cannot accept the images quickly enough, so missing files is kind of common) - but I keep mine on hand because I am so attracted to its output and its unique characteristics.

Here you can see the setup as it evolved - the pvc tube, by the way, is what I use to dispense Fog into scenes like this. It's very long (uncoiled about 32 feet), so pumping fog into it is not only for convenient placement, but it also serves to cool the fog so it doesn't rise up, as well as slow its overall speed so it doesn't jet across the room and not be where I want it to be. Rather it sort of spills out as a kind of crawling puddle, creeping across the surface of the scene.

Here is what the Diamond looks like sat upon the black surface on its own. It's actually a paper pyramid which I very exactly folded with creases as perfectly as I could manage them, and as you saw earlier, it is lit purely by one very shitty DMX LED Can. Once I had gotten the lighting exactly as I wanted it, I started piping fog onto the scene to see how it looked in camera.

Here is a very poor quality gif of that in action! I was surprised how lush it looked, and I love the way fog disperses light through itself. I wasn't sure what this would look like until I tried it out, and I was very pleased with the result.

Here is a still image of the initial grade with a bit of fog pooling around the pyramid. I was pleased with this scene to begin with - What a mysterious object. What is its scale? What is its purpose? I felt that a million years could pass while I sat and stared at it in its silent serenity, waiting for some unknown dawn to rise upon it. But then I fucked around and found out.

The fact that it became a diamond was actually just a thing I tried for fun. It's just the same clip, mirrored vertically and masked with a slight blend between the two where the fog meets. The clip is also offset in time so that it doesn't mirror the motion of the fog at the same time, on either one. 

One of the greatest and most vital parts of the creative process is just trying things out. Making changes leads organically to new things, sometimes bad, and sometimes wonderful. 

And here is yet another poor quality gif of the final grade. Below I am linking an unlisted video that will allow you to view it in "full quality" on YouTube, so have a look if you want!

The Fire Diamond On Youtube 

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In the end, Visions in Fire was actually practice - I had intended to turn Beyond the Stars into a feature length science fiction film based on the premise of ending Wolfgun's existence. That of course did not work out, but for the better!

I love film and I love in-camera effects. I wish to eventually make more short films that include imagery I consider striking as well as clever. I hope reading about this process was inspiring or informative or perhaps just interesting to you. Thank you for reading and for supporting me here on Patreon!