The pitch
The pilot episode for Nirvanna The Band The Show required a massive inferno to engulf the facade of a shop in Toronto’s Queen West district…. across from the Rivoli.
The challenge became setting a banner that big on fire in situation, capturing reactions, and doing it without lighting a match?
The plan
The show's visual effects need to avoid fantastic interpretation. After experimenting with sample materials, accelerants, and fire, we decided a 1:1 burn was necessary for realism. We scouted the Fire Emergency Services Training institute (F.E.T.S.I), and they permitted the ignition of our 24 ft X 16 ft wall of fire.
How’d we do it?
We hung waterlogged green screens from the roof of a burn-safe building, laid the banners atop and lathered the ignition points with accelerant. We hung two banners, the smaller one was the warmup. When the banner burned there would be ten good seconds of key time for fire and smoke before the green screen itself succumbed to the flames. And if the banner melted or tore apart the green reveal would allow me to composite the charred yellow building under the carnage.
The narrative dictated we shoot plates of varnish being applied to the banner by our protagonist before we burned it. So we shot coverage of a paint roller sloppily applying varnish to the banner in specific steps dictated by the edit. Slowly, we designed an arrow of varnish pointing at the one aspect of the banner the characters are attempting to conceal.
We only had one take, so it became a three camera shoot, understanding we would see this fire from three angles. One of the cameras utilized was our show’s handheld camera, we asked the DOP to shoot the inferno as if he would on queen street, which gave us rich handheld footage from very close proximity. The visual effects applied to this footage would occupy the peripherals of our framing, which would register in the audience's subconscious anchoring them to Queen street.
Supporting shots for continuity
Workflows like this are discovered in the pre-edit process with Curt Lobb, the VFX Editor. We shot and edited this sequence three times before before allowing visual effects design to begin. During this time we crudely roughed out the timing and action of each shot, from there, vfx had a foundation from which to build on. Once the vfx shots were locked, Curt and Robert Hyland (episode editors) would build on the established timeline adding the essential fire engines and chaos to further sell the illusions.
“JEEZ.”
BEFORE & AFTER
