A Day Out at the Film Studio

Two weeks earlier, Mike Grant, art director for 'dept ART Ltd.' had sent an email to Bill Wysock ('Tesla Technology Research') in the States asking for assistance in hiring a small Coil for a days filming. Bill advised locating someone in the UK and passed the email onto the Tesla Mailing List. To cut a long story short, Mike T. spotted the post and convinced me to offer up the services of my coil. I contacted Mike G. and plans were made.

('dept ART' specialises in Production Design and Art Direction for the film industry covering a wide area in set design, styling, "In camera effects" and Modelmaking for Commercials , Feature Films, Music Promo's and other Film based arts.)

They were filming some advertisements for 'Intel', for the 'Pentium III' processor and needed some sparky special effects! We were glad to be able to help out (always happy for an excuse to fire up the Coil!), even though Mike T. and I are 'AMD' & 'Athalon' fans!

We asked the usual questions about safety, liability and provisions like having available a good RF ground connection. In the film industry, insurance against accidentally killing a film star is standard equipment. Anyone working on a film set is fully covered for accidental damage or injury, and as it is a closed set with no members of the public involved, it was all sorted.

We set out on Thursday morning at 9am, with Mike T. as navigator and me as driver, and headed for the bright lights of London. We arrived at the studio at 11am to be told that filming was already behind schedule by two hours. We were able to set up the Coil at lunch time, while the film crews broke for food. We got the final OK from the studio technicians to switch her on and do a test. All their expensive digital video equipment had been disconnected and moved out of the away, the lights were low and we had power to the controller.

The earth connection consisted of a 35ft heavy duty earth cable run, terminating on the steel superstructure of the adjacent studio building. We brought the power up slowly, looking for any unusual behaviour, but everything was fine and we took it to full power.

Maybe it was the open space of the studio, or the fact that I'd cleaned the static spark gap the night before, but my coil was running the best it's ever done! The assembled hushed crowd did not know what to expect but after we shut the power off we got an apreciative round of applause. They loved it! We were buzzing! Fantastic!

We made about four runs of approximately 60 seconds duration, while they captured the sparks, in total darkness, on film.

The day ended at around 7pm. Apart from the hanging around all day, we had a great time.

(* Image taken from video footage)