A Lava Lake in a 9 x 13 pan

One of the special effects in iSundae involved creating a lava lake of gigantic proportions for our main characters to cross. Now, we obviously didn’t have room to build an in-ground lava lake in the backyard, so we resorted to the next best thing: Green-screen. After a short brainstorming session, we began contriving a way to make lava out of jello. Here’s how we did it:

We started with a box of strawberry jello, made it according to instructions, and poured it into a glass 9 x 13 pan.

We let it refrigerate until it was almost set, but not quite. We then added some peach jello on top of it. (We originally planned to use orange, but discovered that we didn’t have any on hand.) Then we added pepper liberally. Believe me, there is nothing quite like the smell of un-set strawberry and peach jello with an abundance of pepper.

We wanted to up-light our lava, so we balanced the pan between two stools and shone a small light up from the floor. This provided our “glow.”

Then we were all set to film. We set up the tripod and camera and filmed our lava at different angles, with two of us blowing through straws to make the lava bubble.

The overall effect turned out quite well, as you can see.