Behind the Scenes on Photographer Ray Demski’s Latest Personal Project, ‘Fireball’

I know that I’m preaching to the choir when I say that personal projects, free from the constraints of commercial clients dictating production details, are an important outlet for creativity and staying sharp on your skills. Photographer Ray Demski just dropped his latest passion project, "Fireball," combining parkour, football (soccer), and beatboxing.

Demski has a lot of experience working with athletes, so coming up with an idea like this one for a personal project was only natural. It allowed him to try new things and experiment without restrictions, which is why he makes time for these in between paid projects.

The film pits parkour against freestyle football, in a fiery high-speed battle of acrobatic skill with a burning ball. The action is set off by a beatboxer in the darkness, which adds a unique yet appropriate soundtrack for the action. Demski tells me that the concept came from an idea of pairing fire with freestyle football.

Fire came to mind and stuck, what if we light the ball on fire! A month later I was doing the first tests with our SFX coordinator, and it was amazing! First I thought of just a few tricks with the ball, but then the idea grew. I wanted a “story” of a game situation. I remembered on a previous shoot for Nikon with parkour athlete Lucas Wilson he'd mentioned he had some football experience. And there it was, combined freestyle football versus parkour for an epic game situation.

The setting of the location and the overall look was very dark and moody, and Demski explained that he wanted a very stylized look. Working with cinematographer Clemens Kruger, they shot with a Sony F55 camera with a raw recorder, which gave them the ability to capture amazing slow motion results.

To have the fire really pop from the darkness and for all the action to really sing, it meant shooting at night. At 100 to 200 frames per second, the camera needs a lot of light though! So we had a couple of 4k lamps with high-speed ballasts for light and very fast prime lenses (f/1.4).

In grading we pushed toward the “cool” blue tones for the background while keeping the “hot” orange of the ball to provide a stark contrast.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the production.

Demski also did some photography as a part of this project, and mostly used a Nikon D810 with a 35mm f/1.4 and a 24-70mm f/2.8. Since the video shoot was going to be at night, he needed to overpower the midday sun to create the look he wanted for stills.

We had to shoot earlier in the day to save time for the film shoot, and used flash with Broncolor modifiers to overpower the daylight and achieve the high-end look I was after.

Safety was of course on the minds of everyone on the crew, as a fast moving ball of fire could definitely do some damage. Demski shared that while there were a few “oops” moments on set, they brought on a professional SFX coordinator to make sure nothing serious would happen.

Thankfully only very minor incidents involving a few hairs and nothing serious. Our SFX coordinator did an amazing job of keeping the set safe and the ball burning! There were even special gas mixes to fill the balls with so they would not explode.

Filmmaking might not be a sport, but it is certainly an activity where you need the help of a strong team to succeed, just like in football (soccer for the Americans.) That might be one reason why Ray and his team excel in projects that combine the two.

To see more of Ray Demski’s work, check him out on Facebook.