[MUSIC] >> Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Dustin.
Welcome to this special episode of Homemade Movies, Epic Explosions.
>> Speaker 1: Unlike that one, it was not epic.
Roll the montage.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: In this episode we're going to be taking
a look back at some of our best miniature explosions and fire and sparks and stuff.
Now please don't try any of this at home, we take safety precautions.
Don't mimic us and burn your house down, but we're gonna show you how we do it.
In our Iron Man trailer,
Tony Stark has a gallery of iron Iron Man suits that need to explode.
So we had to figure out how do we do miniature explosions.
Made a bunch of little drawings of little suits and lined them up.
Turns out just lighting a little lighter under it, and
then spraying it with some WD40 makes a nice little poof.
Looks really big and epic on camera, but it's very small little poofs of fire.
But when you shoot it at high speed with a fast frame rate and up close,
it looks really big and epic.
So that's what we do for
all of our miniature stuff whenever we need a big explosion.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: In our homemade Red 2 trailer there are a few explosions.
One of them is an SUV that totally gets flipped on its side.
There’s a stick that’s going to push the car up, and
there’s a hole in the ground that the SUV sits on top of.
The hole is where we shoot the fire through.
Now I don’t know if a car would really flip like that in real life, but
that’s what happens in the trailer, so that’s what we gotta do.
So then there's also a car exploding in a parking lot.
My patio table kind of looked like gravel, put some cars,
a little building, put some weeds in there it looks like a tree.
And then we just fire off our little explosion poof, and
flip that thing on its side and there you go.
It looks like a big massive explosion on camera.
In the Fast and Furious scene there's a shot that goes down into the engine and
they see a little spark and a fire happens.
And I just went upside down inside my broiler under the oven and turned it on.
And when that whole little thing lights up,
you get this cool row of flames coming out.
So, it looked really cool.
>> [MUSIC] >> Speaker 1: Some of
the biggest fireballs that we've done were in our Star Trek Into Darkness trailer,
where we've got future London being bombed.
Same trick, lighter, WD40.
But we set up a bunch of cardboard buildings.
And you can see John's arm reaching in the side behind the buildings.
But it goes by so fast, you don't usually notice.
Next shot was just setting up some pedestrians.
I'm moving the camera by really fast.
And then we just shoot some fire down on there.
It's goes by so fast,
that nothing's even in danger of lighting on fire, or anything.
It just looks so big on screen, but it's just that little poof fire, and that's it.
Spoiler alert, the terrorist turned out to be [NOISE].
Sometimes you just need a huge wall of fire, so I used my
friend Samantha's fireplace because I don't have a fireplace that works.
Anytime we would need just a full solid wall of flames,
just go to the fireplace and put something in front of it.
In the opening shot of the Lord of the Rings trailer that we did, there's a big
fireball that kind of goes along what turns out to be the inside of the ring.
We just built a piece of cardboard and wrote the Elvish writing on there and
then tried to get the fire to sort of go along the side of it.
Also there's one quick shot where Eragon throws a torch, so
we had John throw a fake torch.
Then we quickly dissolved to a separate fire element that we shot.
Since we shot so many fire elements against the black, and
they're just straight out of the camera, they've come in handy.
And we've already just used it recently in the Ender's Game trailer.
We just need the generic puff of fire, little explosion, nice and centered.
So we used that.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: As you can imagine, there's a lot of fire in Catching Fire.
So when we did that trailer home made, there's a lot of miscellaneous fire shots.
You just had to look at the trailer, shot by shot like usual, see what do we need.
What's the safest way to do this, what's the easiest way to do this?
There's a really cool shot of a guy with a flame thrower.
So you look at the original and try and match the angles of it.
It's now shooting towards the camera, so
you've gotta be careful you don't get too close.
Obviously the camera's further away, we're kinda zoomed in.
And this is the first time,
actually, that instead of seeing John's hand up in there, we need it to be dark.
So we finally got around to putting black tape over the little WD-40 can, and
putting his hand in a black sleeve.
So when it pops right up in there against the black background,
you just can't see it at all.
We had a couple of first on our Back to the Future scene.
It was the first time that we used these sparklers that we found that are made for,
I think, birthday cakes.
Also, we used sparks with live action for the first time.
Usually, we're doing fire or things with miniatures, but
this time Doc Brown needed to have some sparks in his hands.
In our Die Hard scene, the whole room is supposed to be on fire, but
we didn't use any fire in this one.
It turns out just putting up some red filters in front of the lights, and
having somebody kind of flash the lights off and on.
It looked really stupid when we were setting it up, and
when we were doing this with the box in front of the lights.
So the whole time, you get the sense that there's a big fire really nearby, but
when you see the final shot, it looks really cool.
And we're like dude, this is probably exactly how they did it in the real movie.
Well, thanks for watching this special edition of Homemade Movies,
Epic Explosions.
Check out all the videos that I mentioned on our playlist, and
subscribe to Cinefix for new ones every single Tuesday.
And come back next week for our big Star Wars theme,
starring Chris Hardwick as Luke Skywalker.
You're gonna love it!
So we'll see you then.
>> [MUSIC]