Lancashire-based live effects wizards BPM SFX recently brought the heat to campus. With an incendiary portfolio including work with Sleep Token, Sum 41, and Oasis, they filled Studio 001 with stage-tech toys of varying lethality.

The session gave (sensibly supervised) students a chance to play with professional kit that ran the gamut from innocuous confetti and bubble machines through to lasers, flamers, pyrotechnics, and sparklers – although it was the hand-held flamethrower that demanded the most interaction.

Loving the smell of accelerants in the afternoon, I rolled up to try my hand at conflagration and take some photos and video in the process. With only my phone camera to hand, I noted a lot of shots with the default app were over-exposed, supersaturated and unusable. Switching to the Blackmagic Camera app for greater control, I was able to adjust ISO and increase shutter speed to better capture the experience – and thankfully record in landscape despite holding the phone vertically. The end result being a short little video to commemorate the day, even if YouTube’s compression fails to preserve the HDR intricacy of the original laser spread.

The soundtrack forms an early work-in-progress teaser of future Trismegistus Hex material. A cheeky, if not outright blatant homage to horror movie maestro John Carpenter, but likely to change substantially in the final cut.

We don’t normally get access to such gear during the course of our studies, so it was great to get hands-on and, for some students, spark new career possibilities.