foam + explosives = ????

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when life's tough or dull MAKE A MOVIE!!

This is not to support the use of explosives, I am VERY against it, that's why we have powder licenses....

After the fact, in the digital world, you can add a big fireball from a stock source, (Pyromania CD, etc...) and by using a little dust (Fuller's Earth) inside the model and on it's roof, you can pretty much hide flaws in the process...

Play Safe (and legal!)

And I totaly agree with you on the explosives but these are little firecrakers ( Ive had one blow up in my hand )they are hardly explosives. Anyways Im scared of explosives so I would never use anything I didnt think was 100% safe!

Well I jsut had to point out that the term "safe explosives" is a total oxymoron. And if you don't know what that means just think in terms of something akin to "good pain". Can't be good and painful unless you're a masochist or something.

Anyway, stuntman is right. Use predone effects in post from a digital stock source. Whether or not you held on to a firecracker as it blew up in your hand is irrelevant. It only takes once for something to blow your hand up when you didn't expect it would. If you've had one blow up in your hand, that's nuts to begin with. But what if some smart a** at the factory said, "I think I'm going to pack this one with enough powder to blow someone's hand off and won't they be surprised". Lo and behold you'll be waving goodbye to manual dexterity with a stump. And wouldn't that be an oops? Play safe.

BE SAFE!!!

Safety first.

...get some ballons or non lubricated condoms, tape, baby powder and some aquarium tubing. you should be able to tape the balloon around the end of the tubing after putting some of the powder in it, hold the other end of the tubing against the air outlet on the compressor turn it on and wait a few seconds, if you have a balloon thats big enough it should inflate and finally explode, hopefully blowing apart your model, making a dust cloud and keeping you out of harms way. you can score the inside of the model with an x-acto knife to aid the balloon in doing its job and further controlling the explosion.

you may need to test various types of balloons and/or condoms before you get that perfect size and stretch

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1. Us wd40 in a squirt bottle to make some nice fireballs. Record it against a black screen, slow it down and luma it onto the clip. (This is MUCH cheaper than buying a FXcd.)
2. Use foam BOARD. It breaks fairly relisticaly. Paint the inside and outside, add furniture and use it with compressed air. You could use the blow hose on a vacume cleaner and some wd40 if you really what to blow it away.
3. Use computer 3d animation. Raydream is good at blowing stuff up. Photograph your model and apply the photos as textures to each side. I would recommend lumakeying the fire onto the scene. Don't use Raydreams fire alone it looks cheesy.

Don't use fireworks. At least not the ones your talking about. They won't look like much of anything if they're that weak.

Play it safe but you don't need to go over board on safety.
Quick burning achohol or wd40 are pretty safe. I've gotten hit by a fire ball made from those several times. It just stings a little.

Work smarter not harder... try to think of safe ways to get the shot... this one took 15+ years of practice, a pyrotechnican, 3 safety team members and about $600.00 worth of materials to keep it safe, if the can of WD40 goes up, I bet you won't have these things with you..

play safe,