Unlike all oth­er spe­cial effects, wind is not vis­i­ble. It only becomes through his inter­ac­tion with peo­ple or objects in front of the cam­era. This results are wav­ing hair, leaves fly­ing through the air, dust that swirls up, trees that move and many oth­er effects.

But we also often use it as a sup­port for some of our effects to help us get bet­ter results; so we are for instance able to direct rain, fire and smoke in a cer­tain direc­tion or to influ­ence it in oth­er ways.

The meth­ods and tech­niques for gen­er­at­ing wind are as var­ied as its effects. We have wind machines, fans, cen­trifu­gal fans and com­pressed air tech­nol­o­gy in stock in any size to be able to imple­ment the effects our cus­tomers require.

Large wind machines have a high ener­gy demand and can quick­ly require well over ten thou­sand watts of elec­tri­cal pow­er. If your pow­er sup­ply on set is not able to han­dle such demand, then we can also per­form almost every effect with our motor- or bat­tery-oper­at­ed machines.

What is there to consider?

BASICS

Large wind machines are heavy and require a rather flat and load-bear­ing sur­face for oper­a­tion. Good access roads also make trans­port to set much eas­i­er.

Many tech­niques for cre­at­ing large wind effects are very noisy. We also dis­trib­ute hear­ing pro­tec­tors for actors and teams, but the orig­i­nal sound on the set will inevitably suf­fer from this. There are ways to reduce the vol­ume con­sid­er­ably, but we want to men­tion the fact that this is very costly.

ON SET

Wind gen­er­ates wind loads and these can destroy a nor­mal set or equip­ment in sec­onds, depend­ing on the size of the effect and the affect­ed area. This can be required by the script in the case of the set, but should NOT hap­pen by chance.

We are there­fore hap­py to advise your con­struc­tion staff in the imple­men­ta­tion of suit­able scenery and instruct your film crew in spe­cial pre­cau­tions. Of course we also build parts of sets as so-called break­aways, which can then be eas­i­ly destroyed by the wind with­out endan­ger­ing your actors.

ACTORS

Rule apply­ing to sets also apply to actors. If your foot­ing is inse­cure, it’ll blow you over; espe­cial­ly when using large wind machines or oth­er tech­nol­o­gy that gen­er­ates high wind speeds.

We there­fore offer train­ing and pre-tests to min­imise the risks and pro­vide an assess­ment, whether an effect has to be built up dif­fer­ent­ly or the use of stunt per­son­nel is a bet­ter solution.