Fruit Burst, How it was done:

The story behind the bubbles.

When one of our clients, an artisan fruit juice producer, decided to venture into flavoured water they needed a new image as refreshing as their product, in fact one that virtually leapt off the page.

The pencil sketch of the proposed rig.

As with all good magic tricks misdirection is the name of the game here.

The key to this whole shoot, was that it's constructed upside down. Look carefully at the sketch above, the fish tank is on trestle legs, allowing a silver reflector to be placed on the floor. Then a strobe is shot directly into it simulating sunlight from above (below!).

A large trace screen behind has another strobe shot through it, to create a glow and enhance the illusion of a far off horizon in the background.

Now the cunning bit, a small bolt was inserted into the apple to make sure it floated exactly the way we wanted it to (upside down).

Then the lucky bit. A small hose attached to a can of compressed air was rigged just out of shot and we were ready for action. Shot one was a complete disaster, water everywhere, blurred apple 90% out of frame, a complete clean down of the tank and full reset.

After a lot of tweaking, we had the air pressure & distance right, the camera shutter wouldn't go fast enough so we dimmed the studio lights and used specialist strobe packs to get us up to 1/15,000 of a second from the flash alone.

It was still very hit and miss, but one good frame gave us all a big sigh of relief.

The most amazing thing? All done in camera! Anyone would think that skill is still a handy thing to have.

Until next time

Matt

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