FIRE CONTINUITY

THE FIRE HAS ITS OWN NARRATIVE AS IT GETS PROGRESSIVELY INTENSE THROUGHOUT THE MOVIE

“We would block out where the fire was going to be and how fast it was moving throughout the whole sequence prior to running any simulation,” explains Arbuckle. “It was part of the system that we created but the layout department helped us with that. They would go through, especially in the all-cg shots where the majority of the frame was going to be our CG forest. We would have a version that told the story of the progression of the fire so that when it got to the effects department, we already had a guide of where it was supposed to be.” Story timing was more important than realistic continuity. “We would get the blocking and layout of it approved to some degree, and would go ahead and show how it translated through the simulated version, and it was one to one,” states Arbuckle. “If you watched our layout version, it just had an area of it turning orange. Then if you looked at the fire version, it was close to where they were. There were a few requests on top of that where the client wanted to do specific things in one spot, but generally speaking it was all blocked out ahead of time.”