I know of a production which was based in a permanent
venue that had a dragon breath fire every night. For them, they used something along the lines of a powdered coffee creamer and made it spray over a small flame with compressed air. The powdered creamer is only truly flamable when airborn and thus kept the
unit fairly safe overall. In any case, I would have a secondary ignition source for the dragon itself.
Ooooh, I hadn't even considered this! I like it, though - I can remotely activate the compressed air/powder mixture and use something like a small butane lighter as my flame source, then I can do a secondary burn with an installation underneath the dragon to provide the final combustion source. Soooo much safer - I hadn't considered separating the breath and the final ignition. I'll check the flammability options of various inert when massed powders, then, starting with coffee creamer and working my way along.... I'm sure that I'll find something that gives me an impressive poof of flame. (I did mention above that I wasn't so hot on using guncotton, which would definitely get me the fire breath, and that's mostly because of its instability - I love the idea of burning otherwise inert dusts.)
Provided that I insulate the mouth of the beast well, I should even be able to do fire-breath trials without igniting the rest of the head. (Or I can just
build some trial heads and test with those - papier-mache is very quick to make and forgiving of this sort of thing.) Thank you all!
To Gafftaper: this whole
effect scares the living crud out of me as well. I was originally pyro-licenced in Canada and the laws here in Ecuador are so much more lax, and with something as large as this there are so many possibilities for it to go wrong in very bad ways. I'm going to do some trials with the powder, and if I can't get it to go satisfactorilly, I'll be resigning from the show but not before I advise the other pyros in my area of exactly what's going on and exactly why I'm quitting. I'm known down here for being less loco than most other techs. Bottom
line? I don't want to be in any way responsible for anybody getting hurt - it's fine to risk my own life and
safety (since I know what I'm doing and can take precautions), but I ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT RISK THE LIVES OF OTHERS. On the other
hand, if I can get it so that it works as safely as possible for this sort of thing, I'll post photos of the final
effect for posterity's sake if nothing else.
And 100% agreed.
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, KIDS. Even for a licenced
pyro tech, what we're discussing here is VERY, VERY DANGEROUS.