BABY’S FIRST BURN SET

Through working on the country club burn set in Episode Violet of Kaleidoscope on Netflix, I learned about so many of the technical considerations and details to create a controlled fire to effectively burn down a set on camera.

Working closely with set decorator Jessica Petruccelli and our crew’s special effects team I learned a lot about inflammable and flame retardant materials, how much plastic is sneakily in everything we buy nowadays, and how to buy a whole set that is essentially metal, glass, and 100% natural fibers or materials.

After realizing how much work and careful planning it consists of to create a dramatic fire sequence on screen, I look at all burn with a newfound appreciation of what it takes to make it.

here is the set plans with the fire plans drawn into it with highlighters and fire bars drawn out

As this plan suggests, we were building the country club cigar lounge, spirits library, hallways and office on a stage so that the filming of the fire could be in a controlled environment.

Building a set of this size with all flame retardant materials is an undertaking and here are some behind the scenes shots of how it looked being put together.

THE SPECIAL SET DECORATION ELEMENTS

curtains that catch fire and burn
bottles of alclohol and liquor that break and fuel the fire
books that can burn
paintings that can catch fire
leather club chairs that can withstand fire.
only metal Christmas decorations

this is on top of all the normal set decoration elements of furniture, flooring, hardware, lighting, and well all the decoration that we could only get in stone, metal, glass or all natural material.

CURTAINS

First we swatched a bunch of options of all natural fiber fabric in our desired color palettes and then we sent a few yards of each of the finalists to the Special Effects Key, Johan.

Johan then conducted burn tests on each fabric to see how the burnt and if there were any off-gas fumes that were not ideal.

These were the finalists of the two that burned the best:

yes, we are buying $109/yard fabric shipped from France just to burn 🥲

Roger lights up the panel of curtains to “buy time”

Then working together with our draper I sent the fabric, and these specifications for the curtains to be custom made with some triples and doubles so that there can be multiple takes of burning the curtains.

After the curtains were made we rigged them at a studio and coordinated with a special outside company to come and treat the curtains (and any set dressing made of natural fibers) with flame retardant chemicals.

a moment where you see the whole wall of curtains while Hannah is exploring the room.

Do you think she is thinking “ah yes, all natural fiber shipped directly from France by a fabric mill that Hermes owns and fastidiously treated with flame retardants”?

look at the fullness of those beautiful drapes!!!! now let’s burn them. 😈🔥

BOTTLES OF BOOZE (like a lot of them)

Lily at work at the country club wine cave tasting room and spirits library.

It is scripted that these scenes take place in a liquor library and wine cave and one of the important key actions is that bottles of wine of booze break and literally add fuel to the flame.

Well obviously we can’t use REAL alcohol otherwise it would be VERY flammable and really add fuel to the flame, so we had to go about creating hundreds of fake bottles of wine and liquor.

Our winery workshop in the set dressing shop

Laying out how the bottles and boxes will cascade on the action in the set. These are custom crates made out of a special non-flammable material that is not wood but painted to look like it.

I don’t think you ever see this corner of the wine cave and spirits library on screen but you do see…

this corner which is a modified version of the idea above and more designed from dramatic breakaway of bottles.

BREAKAWAY BOTTLES

There is a special category of item for tv and movies called “breakaways” which are items that look like glass bottles or glass cups or tables which are really made of resins of plastic which look realistic when they break but are more safe to use than real glass to the actors or crew members who handle them.

For this burn sequence we needed a lot of different breakaways in different bottle shapes and decanter shapes in multiples for multiple takes so you could get this effect:

Breakaways are very delicate and pretty expensive so we set up a whole zone near the stage for our on set dressers that I think provided ample warning for people to be careful around all our precious breakaways.

I joked that the amount of signage and caution tape was just a physical representation of two women’s (mine and Jess’s) anxiety.

Each breakaway was calculated to approximate one of the real bottles of liquor or wine we had dressed in (but as mentioned before with just colored water) with multiples for multiple takes or in case of breakage in shipping or handling (they are very delicate).

now months after making this, this paper no longer makes sense to me, but it did when I made it 😂.

I also had to make a key for our on-set dressers so they knew where to find what bottle quickly for resetting the sets between takes.

CUSTOM FLAME RETARDANT CLUB CHAIRS

Since there were going to be leather club chairs in the burn zone, we needed to find many matching multiples of leather club chair made of all natural materials.

The only way to get the multiples we wanted and truly be sure of the materials was to get them custom made and stuffed only with flame retardant materials of rockwool and lined with panther felt.

When you work long enough on a set you start inadvertently wearing clothes that match it…

they really do look disproportionately deep even though it is indeed the printed dimension from the chairs we were imitating. sigh.

ONE OF THE CLUB CHAIRS VERY EFFECTIVELY AVOIDING FLAMES while the room burns down around it.

CERAMIC BOOKS TO BURN

I worked with an antique book seller to get enough old leather bound books to fit the look of our gentleman’s club cigar room.

But then for the burn scene, we also needed to get ceramic book spines made that could withstand the flames and look like the original antique books. So I worked with a fabricating workshop that helped us make these ceramic dupes.

original real ones below, and fake ceramic spines above.

This is a photo before the burn started actually and all the blackened surfaces are the work of the scenic department. We had 45 minutes to turn over the set from pristine to a burned out set and like a well trained army the whole art department descended upon the set doing what needed to be done to transform the space.

PRE-BURNED ARTWORK TO SWITCH OUT

For some reason I didn’t take more photos of this process. But basically we worked with our favorite framer to make 4x versions of some paintings (1x for the normal shot, 1x already pre-burned, 2x ready to burn on camera) and 2x versions of others: a pre-burn and a post-burn version.

As you can see on the photo above, we already had a painting and frame that the special effects team burned out ready to just switch to a post-burn version.

When picking the artwork, I came across this painting from the Metropolitan Museum Collection which I thought not only fit the right aesthetic and vibe of the room we were creating but the subject matter was some nice little story foreshadowing and thematically on point for the episode.

Sometimes being too on the nose is sort of lame, but in this case I think it worked as a subtle hint in the background and glad Production Designer Michael Bricker agreed!

“Hunting Dogs with Dead Hare,” 1857, Gustave Courbet, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Some more before and after

hey! loving the way the lattice design on the iron table is creating a beautiful pattern in the fire. If you knew how many back and forths were involved about the right table and the right pattern…

On screen as part of the country club, these photos are not from the burn set we built but a location we filmed at and Michael captured Jess and I in a rare moment of downtime waiting for the shooting crew to arrive.

It was actually not easy to find 10x matching standing candelabras and I had to work with a vendor to custom make them for us to rent!

While the burn sequence sits at the heart of Leo Pap’s motivations throughout the whole series, the burn sequence itself only lasts less than 4 minutes on screen.

Yes, a month of work by many many people and vendors working hard together with us totaling over thousands of hours together to prepare all the elements for a FOUR MINUTE on screen safe and cinematic burn.

🔥