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Cue the rain!

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GregW

GregW

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Ever wonder how rain scenes are made in movies? To have rain in a town where it rains naturally only about ten days a year, other means are necessary. Here we have 4 120 foot condors holding sprinkler heads above the set. Each condor has a dedicated water truck to pump water up a fire hose. The height of the sprinklers is needed to give the water drops time to fall straight down. Too low and you'd see drops falling left and right which would look unnatural. The 2 big cranes here are to block the sun from hitting the actors. Each black rectangle you see is 30×60 feet. Above them you can see 4 black boxes. These are chain motors that allow the rectangles to be angled at any degree to block the most sunlight.
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I’m going out on a limb and guessing it’s not a remake of Lawrence of Arabia.
 
gonzo said:
Are they pumping potable H2O? No wonder movies are so expensive to make! Thanks for sharing.
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My guess would be "Yes" to potable water. Can't risk contaminating the set or actors... it's California after all. :giggle:
 
It's all smoke and mirrors.........and sprinklers apparently! :D
 
gonzo said:
No wonder movies are so expensive to make!
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It is all relative. Water is a small expense. This photo is a set from Memoirs of a Geisha. It started out as a grassy field. Everything you see ( and more) was built for this film. The fabric at top of the photo is to soften the sunlight as well as evening out artificial light while shooting at night. This photo was taken at night. Sometimes we'd shoot until dawn. The fabric covers almost 2 acres. There were two towers built to hold it up. To keep the wind from toppling the towers, a weather station was installed and the fabric was retracted when the wind hit 35 MPH. Almost 8 million pounds of water was used for ballast, stored in septic tanks around the tower bases.
The stream was built with pumps to continually recycle the water through the set. The bridges, only one seen here, were built for cars and military trucks to drive across. The snow is fake. It is paper pulp and batting that you'd find in your sofa. The snow was used for only one day of shooting, then was removed over a weekend. At the end of it all, the set (including the stream) was torn down and the field was restored.
geisha1-hanamachi850.jpg
 
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