If you’ve ever dropped a pumpkin from a significant height and watched it explode into chunky, orange bits of pulpy goodness, you know that there’s something inherently fascinating about it. Really, it’s fun to smash any kind of squash or melon, but there’s something extra special about pumpkins.
Maybe it’s because we carve faces into them.
Anthropomorphism implications aside, exploding pumpkins are awesome. So one would infer that exploding pumpkins in slow-motion would be even more awesome, and they would be right.
This video, created by YouTube user devinsupertramp and scored by his friend Stephen Anderson, is all kinds of creepy. It’s perfect for the Halloween season. Check it out below:
Here’s how they achieved the effect:
We shot the pumpkins smashing with the Red Epic camera at 300 frames per second. Then in a couple of the shots I put the slow motion clips into Twixtor, a program that adds frames to make it even slow, and I made those shots run at 1000fps, by adding frames in between the other frames.
As far as the lighting goes, we used an Arri kit. We filmed the smashing of the pumpkins right outside my friends apartment. We dropped them off the three story building into the parking lot. To make the space look like it was in the middle of nowhere, we also drapped a black cloth/sheet. And we also covered the ground with water, and the pumpkins so they would shine/glisten in the lights that we had set up.
Neat, huh?
I started thinking about other odd uses of pumpkins, so here are some other great pumpkin-related videos:
First, this is a fun, grotesque use of science –
Pumpkin catapult, anyone? –
This pumpkin cannon destroys everything in its path –
And finally, the smashing pumpkin video to rule them all –
