Recreating The Aurora Borealis With A Piece Of Fabric
May 14, 2015
Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
Share:
So, what if you have to create an Aurora Borealis right the middle of anywhere but the North Pole? Usually it means that you’re done (unless you actually go to the north pole). But Joey Shanks really needed some Borealis for his movie production – SPECTRUM.
What he did was quite clever, he used pieces of colored fabric and pieces of lit fabric dancing in the wind as a base and then he composed them into the final movie.
It took some experimentation and Joey had to use multiple fans to to create enough wind. Joey cleverly had all the fans facing a center of a circle to the fabric just kept dancing forever while being contained inside the circle. Lots of work? definitely less than flying out to the north pole.
Here is a movie showing how it was done:
[Recreating the AURORA BOREALIS | Shanks FX]
P.S. you can get a similar effect with some paper cutouts and LEDs.
Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
Related Posts
Watch a GoPro Hero 5 taken apart piece by piece (then put together again)
Breathtaking Time Lapse Showing How Beautiful The Aurora Borealis Is
This beautiful 8K 360° timelapse shows the Aurora Borealis during a total lunar eclipse
This stunning compilation puts 8 days of aurora borealis into a 3-minute video
Join the Discussion
DIYP Comment Policy
Be nice, be on-topic, no personal information or flames.
3 responses to “Recreating The Aurora Borealis With A Piece Of Fabric”
“North Poll”. It’s where we Canadians go to vote.
I <3 ShanksFX. So few people these days take the time to do practical FX yet they're really much more compelling than generic After Effects plugins. Having seen the northern lights many a time in real life this doesn't really duplicate the effect, but he's on the right track. With a few tweaks I could see it getting pretty close. I may have to play with this myself.
Hey, I live in North Pole. :D That said, points for trying practical effects but the aurora doesn’t really look too much like that. Still neat to see someone trying stuff out.