fireworks

[bassy]

Hi everybody,

tommorow it's new years eve, (i guess)

i thought to go out and capture the fireworks, and I'll (try to) use this footage in my next show.

did anybody such thing before? is it worth to go out and capture the sky or is it just some red-green flashes all the time, so much that when u capture it that it doesn't give you the feeling of being there in real.

Any body suggestions about angles and stuff where should I pay attention for??

the thing I'm thinking to doe is to zoom out completly and shoot the place and the sky if possible and I'll try not to tough the camera.
Btw, here in antwerp the fireworks ar shooted (is this good english??) from a boat, the egnition (and this one??) give also some nice flames, so that's the reason i gonna try to shoot a part of the water to.

only one problem till now. It's still raining here, hope it will be better. Why can't they just do it indoor,....

to all a happy newyear

Greets Bassy

[holly]

Yeah, fireworks are hard to capture. Exposure is always wrong and the camera is either pointing at the wrong spot or too wide to have real impact. This is probably one of those things that would look best coming from a stock video company or even taped off TV. Maybe try your local library for a documentary on fireworks?

There are some java fireworks that you could probably download for free and embed in a webpage, but I guess it would be too videogame cheesy.

(Oh, and fireworks are shot from a boat, and the ignition gives nice flames.)

Good luck! Tell us what you discover.

HOLLY

[syzygy]

Originally posted by holly
Yeah, fireworks are hard to capture.


We've had some success with filming fireworks.

* When filming a big display, make sure you are at a good distance. Make sure you are focussed to infinity.

* Set off fireworks yourself for more control. I have a contact who gets me display-grade fireworks (our back garden displays have something of a reputation...) but even quite small fireworks can look great as long as you have total black behind them to hide the scale.

Professionally triggered firework displays almost always follow certain patterns - after watchhing them for a while, you can start to anticipate where the next big bloom is going to come. Don't chase around the sky with your camera, instead, pick a part of the sky where you think something is going to happen and concentrate on it. A common pattern is 3 or four smaller blooms lower in the sky followed by 3 or four bigger ones at about twice the height - the higher ones are the ones you really want so when you see an arrangement that doesn't look quite complete, aim high and wait for the pattern to be completed.

You need a bit of luck to get the right shots but it's definitely worth trying.

Good luck!

Dan.

(Syzygy Visuals)

[Akira]

or if you needed clips before hand of fireworks, google has some nice clips throughout it. for instance:

http://euroclub.mit.edu/Archive/Gallery/2002/movies_4thJuly/

there are others, all you really have to search for is "fireworks+mpeg".

But it is always nicer to capture something yourself (makes you feel like you've accomplished something :D )

[KillingFrenzy]

I have a nice firework loop, and here's how it basically works.

I just had my little pc100 camera with me, and I was running around, so I didn't have a tripod with me.
The fireworks started to go off, and I leaned my camera on a railing and aimed it, using the railing to stabilize. I was able to get some halfway stable decent long shots of some full blooms. Then, I picked up the camera and did my best to really zoom in and anticipate the point where the explosion would go off. Sometimes it worked, sometimes I missed the whole thing or got really jerky footage. Since firework displays tend to get bigger and brighter as they go on, I went back to a nice stable longshot for the finale. I took all of the footage and digitized it, then went in and cut out all of the parts where I was zooming and shaking the camera around. I chopped up my stable shots into small chunks and then pieced in closeups between them. I slowed down the speed on the closeups to 80% to make them a bit more fluid. I intentionally mixed up the order of the progression from beginning to end, so that it wouldn't seem like it was in any order.
The result is a nice fireworks loop that is about 3 minutes long and doesn't repeat too noticeably unless you're really scrutinizing it.

My other advice is to lay off the "slow shutter" and other effects. All good and fun at the time, but not much use later when you'd like to have a clean image to use to add a different effect on.

I did shoot some fireworks once with "slow shutter" on my sony and intentially going into the digital zoom. The result looked like a Cocteau Twins video, but I actually find the year I got the clean footage and made the loop of to be much more useful (contrast almost always looks better for projections, as opposed to blurry).

[bassy]

Hi Guys,

Happy new year to all.

The first impression of the footage is that it went quite well. I've got some 29 minutes of fireworks.

I assume that I can make a nice loop of it.

anyway, January the 13th my exams will start, so don't expect anything before they end.

thanx to anyone for the tips and support.

Bassy

Btw, after my dad were the images shot by the local television station bad, they didn't calculated before that there would be a crane in the middle of the screen......they had no time to replace the cams...