Bomb Experts Review Explosions from ‘The Dark Knight’ to ‘Breaking Bad' | Vanity Fair

if you did this in a movie theater and had the actual explosion force from c4 going off you'd have to have a big sign that says put in your earplugs now remind me not to come here movie theater [Music] [Music] hi I'm Paul woodsy and I'm a professor of explosives engineering and I'm tassel of our a special effects supervisor in Los Angeles today we're going to review explosions in TV and film from a scientific perspective and a filmmaking perspective desperado [Music] in the guitar case we see some modern era grenades but unfortunately they're rolling around that's not the sort of thing I'd want to do with grenades has happened rolling around bouncing into each other and I personally wouldn't throw a guitar case full of grades at my girlfriend these look like wire around grenades inside those casings rather than a segmenting grenade the original grenades were pineapple in design and was supposed to break up into large chunks and that was the idea on them and these large chunks were propelled out and killed people modern grenades are designed to give a lot of fragments very small fragments which are termed frag the term shrapnel is usually used accidentally instead of Frank in a lot of films and shrapnel actually his ball bearings and there was a shell called the shrapnel shell and it was invented by mr. shrapnel so in a shrapnel shell the ball bearings are there and they're blown everywhere by the explosives fragged comes from a steel casing that's broken it's turning to pop metal by the detonation wave and these small pieces fly everywhere they're sharp do a lot of damage in a lot of movies somebody'll throw a grenade you'll see a huge fireball and that's not really realistic unless they set off a propane tank that's just off frame a frag grenade when it goes off will be a puff a rather large bang but you definitely won't see a lot of flame to create that effect they would have placed explosives specifically with a view toward causing that wall of fire playing the grenades of course are simply props that the stunt performers on the ground react to to create this explosion they probably would have used gasoline lifted by charges placed between the two buildings you can even see in the top right corner part of what seems to be the bag that the gasoline was likely poured into then there's a smaller explosion where they're flung away from it which is probably done with an air ramp or something to allow them to jump the way they do and then we see the wide shot of the two main actors against a fireball and it's done very cleverly in that there's really good protection for them and of course it's on a long lens to come press the distance between them and the fireball the fireball is actually between the two buildings so it's basically going up like a wall instead of billowing out like a mushroom so other than the radiant heat there's really no risk to them and they're good actors so they don't flinch they carry it off and it makes a great shot Batman [Music] [Music] in this sequence were seeing a lot more complex effects than just the explosion first off the Catwoman performer punches through the metal door to the cabinet in the metal door to the cabinet obviously wood after we prepared in such a way that this performer could punch through safely and it would look like it was supposed to do when it broke this sort of thing is what's called a breakaway and frequently it's made so you can replace it quickly so you can do multiple takes once she rips it open we then see her break the gas line and gas escaping and there's a sign that it says gas but just to show us visually what's happening there's a substance streaming out of the broken line at the time the film was made that was probably freon a component of air conditioning systems unfortunately that has ozone destroying properties so currently we would probably use something like liquid nitrogen or liquid co2 to create a visible jet of gas then we see her put spray cans into the microwave and start it which then appears to trigger the larger explosion whether this is realistic or not I think it looks really really good and I've seen a lot of gas explosions and they can look quite spectacular this is what happens in people's houses sometimes that the gas escapes and it builds up in the house and it builds up slowly to the lower end of the explosive limits and then there's a spark of some sort that's all it takes I would expect personally see a little bit more of a blue color to it when you do combustion if you're on the lean side it tends to be a little bit blue and if you've got too much fuel in there it goes on the yellow side to manage the risk in this explosion they used very cleverly a series of different ones first off you see the real performers in the configuration in front of a building which probably had no explosives in it to set up the geography of the shot then you see an over-the-shoulder shot which with what is very likely a stunt performer as Catwoman which is convenient because she happens to be wearing a costume which lends itself to her that and then later you see a much wider shot where there are no performers in the proximity to the explosion at all which they can a full-force explosion so they go from no explosion to smaller explosion to a huge explosion and by cutting them all together it creates the illusion that the performers are right next to it the over-the-shoulder is clearly shot with a very long lens with a view toward compressing the distance between the explosion and the performers very successfully it also makes the shot more dramatic the other thing that they will tell stunt people to do is move a little bit or they'll think you're a dummy humans are looking for human characteristics that's why they'll very often have the stunt performer make some sort of small movement leading into or reacting to the explosion even that's minimal just to show you that it's not a dummy in a real explosion okay that's gonna be a shockwave and that will cause things to move okay I have some footage underground where we have our explosive camp and for high school students and the campus of them we shoot dynamite about a hundred foot down the tunnel all that force comes towards them what it'll do is they'll blow their hair all over the place on the girls and their pant legs on everybody will flap backwards and forwards and sometimes will be use enough don't knock off hard hats if they're in just the right place so it's quite an experience it's the dark night this was a real building demolition done for the movie actually on a real building that was scheduled to be demolished in any case we blow up a lot of different things in this film and without major explosions I was determined to do one of them for real it's very important as special-effects people that we keep current and enhance our skills to the degree that we can but it's also important to know our limits building demolition people shouldn't do special effects and special effects people shouldn't do building demolitions it's apples and oranges in this case you have two disciplines working together to create this overall effect we're working in very close conjunction with Chris and his crew so would they'll have their special effects going off and it won't interrupt our demolition charges on the demolition side I can tell you exactly what happened the window start to reverberate and shake and that happens a roughly five seconds before the building actually starts to fall and those reverberations are made by detonating cord going off inside the building the actual concrete columns inside that building will each have had say three or four explosive charges which are actually drilled into the concrete then they're rats with chain-link fence and giatec all of this material is to prevent any debris from flying out of the building when we blast so that stops all that concrete flying everywhere when you blast that pillar what you want to do is you want to turn that concrete into its original ingredients which is lime sand and aggregate and what happens is it gets blown off the rebar and the rebar inside the concrete is just like a string and it gives the concrete tensile strength and bending strength but soon all that concrete is gone the actual rebar gets pancaked the debris is handled very effectively in this particular sequence because we want the talent to be close enough to the explosions to tie together without subjecting them to a potential risk as you noticed before things get really serious the town is all inside the bus which probably has had the windows replaced with something that doesn't break some sort of polycarbonate or something so they're really well protected and they're not only from debris but from sound as dr. C pointed out all this stuff is contained by the chain-link fence and all these precautions that are taken you don't get that debris flying off so what we supply is lightweight debris that's control but flies off in a visually spectacular way and enhances the effect from looking at some of the behind-the-scenes images you can see that the debris mortars were actually as is common firing pieces of cork and lightweight debris and the metal drums were probably filled with a combination of gasoline and something else to make it more visually interesting which then creates the fireball and with all those explosions going on he doesn't lose it for one iota just the perfect performance you can make the actors as safe as they can possibly be but if they didn't feel safe it's gonna affect their performance Joey doesn't care about any of this he's he's completely nonchalant and if he hadn't felt safe I don't think his performance would have been the same breaking bad you got one part of that wrong this is not meth in this scene he's using mercury fulminate or former native mercury and you might ask what is that what is this she dominated mercury a little tweak of chemistry mercury fulminate basically is made by taking mercury mixing in nitric acid and the other ingredient is moonshine and when you make this stuff it's very interesting you need lots of moonshine because it steadies your nerves as well as being an actual component what we see in this TV clip is fairly accurate because mercury fulminate is very very sensitive to shock sparks and heat and things like that in fact it was deemed too dangerous after a while through puts in blasting caps and it was replaced by lead stiffening when the explosion occurs you may ask how come the guys inside survived well the actual fact is that buildings are not very strong compared to humans so what you see is the windows blowing out probably at less than 1 psi whereas you're not going to get permanent hearing damage until you get up to about 5 psi the net result of this is going to get a lot of bang inside the building but there's not enough pressure to totally rip it apart enough to pop out the windows enough for the people inside to survive although they'll have a slight headache and ringing in their ears as you see on the clip actually the explosions very carefully and cleverly done it's done in in a series of cuts but the first one is the actual actor in slow motion throwing the packet and then we see what looks like a small spark explosion which gives a cutting point to the outside of the building where we have debris mortars simulated glass the stunt people down below and a mechanical effect of releasing what looked to being fake air-conditioning units so all together it gives a very violent and extended point of view from several angles which makes the explosion much more dramatic and one part on the building it looks like all the windows blow out on the one side but at the corner it appears that corner window on the other side doesn't blow out it's the painted side of the building that window really should have gone out but we got a lot of quick film cuts here so it gives the effect it needs to rush our tag that's beautiful that's nice what's that it's c4 there's people that's c4 [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah okay see force pretty standard explodes if I got plenty in my magazines back at the University it's actually white in color but the the packings what's colored it's generally an olive drab which kind of looks like a greasy slimy doctor had a swatch in reality shooting c4 with a handgun isn't gonna set it off because see falls relatively insensitive but that one-in-a-million shot where they actually hit the firing device it could dump that electricity into into the blasting caps and thereby set off the c-4 with the charge in the back in the trunk it's not realistic for it to be flipped it's more likely the whole back end of that car would be totally blown away with ten pound of c4 because it's contained and the massive amount of pressure on gas that would be inside it the front end would survive the rear end would be blown off but you'd expect also for a lot of the body panels to be blown off which you usually see in explosion things like not suddenly it goes flying it yeah and we wouldn't see so much of a fireball even though it's nine but ten pound of c-4 good hefty charge from a movie standpoint basically zero damages acceptable even cracking those windows or something like that is considered something you really want to avoid we're using low explosives where it's all bark and very very little bite we want it to be way cool looking without all the as he described body panels and things like this flying off in an uncontrolled manner in this case it looks like black powder and gasoline either that are naphthalene depending on the circumstances naphthalene is a form of mothballs it's essentially a solid hydrocarbon and the combustion of it if it's done in a special-effects context looks a lot like gasoline and the idea of the car flip itself that could be accomplished by creating a separate explosion probably in a cylindrical mortar directed so that a piston or plunger is forced out the bottom the car then is forced up into the air you're talking about the flip being created by other than the explosion that causes the visual effect they've got concrete barriers in there to contain the vehicle right this is this is a problem you have to plan for not only if the effect goes the way you want it to but also if it doesn't where does a vehicle loaded with explosives go if it doesn't function the way you expect it to and that K rail there is probably there to catch it if that were to happen but to me what really sells this entire sequence is his reaction at the end that dance the jubilation after he's had all that trouble makes the whole scene every bit as good as the explosion I wish I had those moves filmmaking is is the art of creating an illusion in the minds and the hearts of the audience whether that corresponds to what would really happen or not isn't important it's important that the audience believes what you're doing enough to be entertained and that's what we're striving for it's kind of like shooting a firework display watch you're therefore it's to wow the public not to be a thump junkie and get all the entertainment yourself

Channel: Vanity Fair

Views: 458,055

Keywords: explosions, explosives engineering, explosives, explosive engineer, vfx, vfx expert, the dark knight vfx, breaking bad vfx, film vfx, rush hour, rush hour vfx, special effects, batman vfx, explosions review, vanity fair reviews, vanity fair, desperado, visual effects, movie vfx, explosions vfx, explosive vfx, explosives vfx, paul worsey, tassilo baur, vfx breakdown, vfx artists react, vfx artist, film engineering, explosion engineering, explosion vfx, sfx

Id: slSBTkTXCGc

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 19 2020