| I added muzzle
and talent flashes to three shots. Muzzle flashes typically last
one frame. I used a single frame for the handguns and two frames
for the shotgun blast. The production team had
attempted to create in-camera flashes but their use of a xenon strobe
proved troublesome. Strobes have far too short a flash (measured
in thousandths of a second) to be reliably captured by a film or video
camera which is typically exposing the frame for half the duration of
the frame rate, i.e.: 1/48th for 24fps.
I have created in-camera flashes with everything from
cards flashed in front of tungsten instruments to an LED flashlight
flashed at the talent.
Where a practical flash was missing, I hand-painted
single-frame mattes to motivate the flash on the talent. The matte
was used to "dodge" the source frame.
One thing this technique can't do is create
illumination where the talent is in deep shadow (like the left side of
her face in this example.) The talent flashes worked better when
they were coming from the gun closer to the key light source.
However, with single-frame flashes, the eye doesn't have time to
register the incongruity.
Muzzle flashes can be very bright and large in a
darkened environment. I created muzzle flashes and composited them
over picture using a "screen" mode.
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