How not to burn down a house.

In my last blog post I made use of the image below:

It's pretty cool, but it got me thinking, How The Heck Is That Possible?!?! As someone who passed their Astronomy class last year with all A's, I know that light is invisible; the only reason we see light is because it reflects into our eyes, but we shouldn't be able to see light rays. In order to achieve having visible light rays, the production crew has to create literal atmosphere for the light to reflect off of tiny particles in the air that go on to form what looks like a ray of light.

In the past I've actually tried to make use of this technique with my music video, Me + Michael. For the production I had arranged to check out equipment from BECON-TV; among the camera gear and lights I decided to also check out a fog machine for 1 specific shot. I personally have never used one before, but my co-star Michael Orlando apparent had. The shot was meant to be a reveal with red light spilling into a hallway of purple light, and I thought the fog machine would all me to get a few light rays in the shot. 

When we went to film, we ran into several issues. We first found that most of the fog from the machine would just fall straight to the ground rather than linger in the air for a bit. We then began to notice that the smell wasn't pleasant to be around. And lastly we realized we forgot to account for ventilation when my smoke detector went off. Persistent as we were we tried for a little bit more only to give up. Luckily for you we captured this moment on video when we were still testing the setup.

Its now been about 10 months since the events of Me + Michael, and I lowkey want to give the fog machine a second chance. This time though I was going to do my homework; I found this video about how a photographer goes about adding smoke to their sets. In this video I learned that there are actually different types of fog machine fluids. Since for my film I don't need nor desire heavy streaky smoke, I might just stick with light fog fluild to create a hazy look. This would allow for light rays to be visible while also not over doing the amount of smoke and making the house look like it was actually burning. While I'd still check out a fog machine from BECON-TV, I would use my own fog fluid as opposed to their's that might be very old (now that I think about it). Switching to a newer fuild might also help with the smell so that's always nice.

I found this Light Fog Fluid for about $10