Fog effect

For our chase scene, I thought that it would be a great idea to add a smoky effect to our shots, making it add to the tension and create an atmosphere within the scene. It would also add to the idea that we want the initial scene to look as if the victim is lost, and constantly running from her attacker, as if in a drugged state.

To find out how to create this effect, I immediately thought of dry ice, but I felt it necessary to research into it before going ahead and buying dry ice, to see if there were alternative methods. In this search, I found a website that explained about a method of creating steam "fog" with only water and ice.
Below shows the video that I took as I tried this method out:

As said in the video, this technique to make fog wasn't very successful, and so, my initial idea of the dry ice came into light again. I now just needed to get some, and find out how to use it.

Researching, I discovered that all you had to do to make the fog effect with dry ice is to get dry ice pellets or blocks and put almost boiling water onto it, initiating the fog reaction. A good You Tube video that I found, creating this effect is shown in the video below:

The cheapest dry ice pellets/ blocks that I found were rather expensive however, priced at £27.60 for only 2.5 kg. This, with the amount of money that my group and I were willing to spend on props and equipment for this project, was too great, so I decided to look into more alternative methods of creating fog effects.

I found one other way to make fog- with "fog fluid" and a fog machine. But again, a fog machine would cost far too much money for what we were willing to spend. With this obstetrical in mind, I looked for a tutorial into how to make a fog machine. The best tutorial that I found is shown below:

This idea, however good, firstly doesn't produce enough fog to be able to give the atmospheric effect that I wanted, nor is it robust enough to be able to work with it on a windy, possibly rainy, evening within a wooded area, so this idea was written off also.

When I had finally decided that we were going to have to forget about the fog idea, because of all the problems that we would face with how to heat the fog fluid to produce the desired effect, I posted a "help" post on Facebook to see if anyone had a fog machine that we could borrow, or any cheep dry ice suppliers. Within five minuets, my grandad phoned me and explained he had a fog machine that we could borrow and a generator to give it power! This was amazing, and I went round to their house immediately to get the machine, to see how good it would be for our needs- filling a pathway in a wooded area with fog.

However, when I got to their house, I found that because the equipment was so expensive, and we were going to a wooded area when it was getting dark, I didn't feel comfortable with taking this type of stuff with us into our location. This, however disappointing, wasn't a complete waste of time as the effect would have been really good if we had been able to do it, it is just because of resources as we are not a professional company creating a movie with a large budget.

Overall, I am pleased that I investigated this, as it would have been an amazing feature within our film opening, but we are unable to get this effect. Being that our filming of the chase scene is tomorrow now, the mise en scene, makeup and story line should be good enough to for the result that we want to produce for this chase scene.