Shooting Ink drops

[Nate Vander plas]

Something to watch out for would be reflections in the glass of the tank. You may have to shoot at an angle to the glass (other than 90 degrees) and make sure the rest of the room is dark. I might try a white background if you are using black ink. A simple luma key should be good enough to remove the background. Green or blue might work too, but any green edges may look strange. I guess it depends on the background you intend to use in post.

[Iancorey]

Shoot in a dark room with a light source close to the tank (above or below) and another illuminating your white background. A flat-lit background is pretty important. The camera’s reflection is far less an issue this way. Nate’s right, a luma matte should do the trick.

The first time I dropped dye I expected to see a burst of color. What happened was a little less spectacular. The dye hits the surface and is very light weight so it just sits there, slowly sinking into the water, maybe moving with whatever current remains from filling the tank. The shapes it makes are cool and with multiple colors overlaying and mixing it’s brilliant, but not what I was looking for. I’m sure in super fast-mo it would look a little neater.

What I ended up doing was mixing dye with watered-down latex paint and dropping a half cup at once. Of course I shot with a black BG due to the lightness of the paint. This is a totally different effect though. A lot like inverted smoke.

[Nate Vander plas]

That looks really sweet though! Way better than anything you could get out of a particle generator or any other CG method. That makes me want to try it now.

[Iancorey]

My mentor taught me that anything you can shoot in 15 seconds will take you hours to perfect with plugins. Plugins are awesome but Mother Nature pwns.

[David Bogie]

Back in Ye Olden Days of AE1+ and AE2+, WE DIDN’T HAVE PLUGINS. So we shot all this stuff in studios with traditional techniques.

You can search for CLOUD TANK for additional help and suggestions (but you will get thousands of hits for classic cosmic ray experiments). Remember “Close Encounters”? The big billowy clouds? White latex paint in a tank.

We once shot a fluorescent dye being dribbled into a tank. It was the yellow stuff they use in the bubbles on levels ( it’s alcohol-soluble so it won’t freeze if the 6 foot level gets left in the pickup truck). We shot on video using banks of 4-foot blacklights.

Once we had the video, we could do just about anything: key it, invert it, run it backwards, flip it.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Ong Joseph]

Thanks so much guys!! Now…time to film. Can’t wait to use the footage for my film.