- Here we go, fire in the hole on zero! Three! Two! One! Zero!
- We are about to do our big explosion, which is kind of the crown, on this episode.
And it's going to be nuts. We're actually going to do the explosion three times.
Twice, big, normal, real-life explosions.
Then a third Hollywood one, where we actually throw diesel onto the explosion,
to give us that Hollywood fireball. That movie explosion that you always see.
(explosion)
So, we have a lot of really wonderful, brilliant people working.
Like, that gentleman over there is making the explosions.
- Hi, my name is JD Streett, and I'm a licensed pyrotechnician
in the state of California, and federally.
We're showing a series of explosions, some of them are movie explosions,
which are safer and prettier. And then we'll compare it with some high-order explosions
that are more for industrial use, and a little more energetic.
The high-order explosion is a binary. It means we manufacture it in two parts.
And in this case, we have a liquid, and we have a dry material.
We mix it together, and it kind of makes a paste.
(explosion)
- So, the big difference between a movie explosion and a real-life explosion
is that a real-life explosion is meant to cause damage, to be devastating.
And a movie explosion is meant to look cool on camera.
Oh, my God. It looks like it's going through water.
Like, it's just moving all the... oh my gosh, it's dispersing so much air.
The shockwave, it looks like it's going through water. When you see an underwater explosion,
you can actually see it move, is what it looks like. It looks liquid. Which makes sense.
It was awesome, sorry.
And how we're capturing it? Great question. We're using an IX slow-motion camera,
a Phantom slow-motion camera,
two Flir thermal cameras, one that can shoot at 1000 frames per second,
that's going to be very good for the pig skin experiment.
And then we just have basically every other camera that we have, filming it as well.
So, I'm really, really excited. And it's going to be cool.
And safe. Very safe, 'cause safety is key.
- That was 10,000 frames a second, at 2X shutter.
So it's the equivalent shutter speed of 20,000.
My name's Matt Rece, and I'm with IX Cameras,
and I'm out here as a high-speed camera tech, helping out for the shoot.
So, we were shooting at 10,000 frames a second,
and we had the shutter time at the equivalent of 20,000 frames a second,
so that we would minimize the motion blur on full bearing.
Your normal cellphone camera, or regular video camera that you use,
you're usually shooting at 30 frames a second.
And you're playing it back at 30 frames a second.
On a high-speed camera, we increase the frame-rate that we capture it at.
So, for instance, if we get 300 frames a second,
and then we played it back at 30 frames a second,
it's ten times slower than what you would normally have.
You can see the organs turning inside there, it really came out pretty good.
- Got that little puff of smoke off there, yeah, man.
That's going to look beautiful when they cut that together.
- Exactly.
(explosion)
- We're using high-speed cameras,
but we're also using high-speed cameras that capture thermal imagery, too.
So you can really break down the explosion
by different levels of heat that are coming out,
and really explore what's going on inside that explosion, in a way that I've never seen before.
- Normal camera looks at visible light. Our cameras are actually looking at infrared light.
So, these specific cameras are looking at the mid-wave IR spectrum.
What it's doing is it's actually looking at
the reflection and radiation of heat.
So, the camera right here is a high-speed camera, it records at 1000 frames per second.
We filmed something yesterday where the whole explosion
went off in like half a second, but we were able to slow it down at 1000 frames per second,
and look at where every little particle that came out of the barrel of that ballistics tube,
where it went. That's pretty cool.
- It'll look great. You happy with it? - Yeah.
- For us, the challenge of the show is to get as much information as possible,
into the body of the show, and still do it in a way that's entertaining to watch.
And I really think Jake and the production team have achieved something incredibly special.
- Three! Two! One!
(explosion)
- That was awesome.
(laughing)
Oh, that was cool!