A rainy day - Quicksilver SFX Blog

A rainy day - 13-Aug-2009

As I suspect with most other eager youngsters my view of special effects involved lots of setting fire to things or blowing them up or both. However, in reality for every caravan you blow up there are days and days of making it rain – it isn’t glamerous and you don’t get much of a smile from the crew. In fact there is a lot of water on TV that isn’t all that it seems to be, from leaking taps to large scale tanks and they all need our help. Where do get the water from? Where are you going to get rid of it afterwards? Does it need to look murky? Does the water need heating? How much water is needed & how much will it weigh?…… and so the questions go on.

A thousand litres of water (1 cubic meter) has a mass of one metric tonne and a moderate size tank eg 30ft diameter, 6ft deep contains over 128,000 litres and hence has a mass of over 128 tonnes – this is one of our standard tanks used on BBC’s Cutting It and ITV’s Primeval. It’s most recent use was when we were using a much smaller thank inside an ITV studio and safety requirements meant that the smaller tank (full of water) had to be placed inside a second tank in case leaks or spillage as actors and camera crew climbed in and out of the tank.

The impossible comes as standard, miracles take a little longer.