Behind the scenes of ‘The slow death of the electric guitar’ – a.k.a. how we got paid to set a guitar on fire
By Matt Callahan
For two months, I wanted to burn a guitar. From when I first heard about Geoff Edgers’ story on the death of the electric guitar, to the first project meeting with reporter and editors, all I saw in my head was a guitar engulfed in flames. It told the whole story — the death of the electric guitar. It’s a guitar being cremated just like when Jimi Hendrix burned his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U5dvC5qr6Y
We had a few missteps figuring out where we could burn the guitar (I proposed one of our bosses’ backyards), and whether it was actually possible to do so. A quick google image search didn’t turn up anything like I had in my mind. Ditto on YouTube videos. Eventually, we found a photo on Getty Images of a guitar that was kind of close — but it felt static.
Design manager Suzette Moyer and I started thinking of backup plans: what if we just smashed a guitar instead? I started talking with our videographer on the project, Erin O’Connor, and we agreed a smashed guitar is pretty cool, but not rock-and-roll-devil-horns-flaming-guitar cool.
Around this time, on the suggestion from video editor Tom LeGro, I made contact with the Arlington County Fire Department. After a few back and forth messages, they offered their training academy for us to burn the guitar — with staff on hand to ensure everything was controlled and safe.
Erin and I visited the training academy in late May to see where we would burn the guitar. It was a large shipping crate setup to simulate flash fires. They offered to help make sure the guitar caught flame, while expressing doubt that the guitar would catch flame. An electric guitar after all is a solid slab of wood with a polyurethane coat. Erin staged a chair in the simulator to get a sense of framing.
As the burn day approached, we were nervous. There was rain in the forecast and we had to postpone to guarantee our gear wouldn’t get wet. But the delay gave us a few extra days to consider how we could mount the guitar to make it appear to float. A visit to a hardware store ensued, and I assembled a rig of metal pipes and fittings sturdy enough to hold a guitar at whatever angle we needed. (If you look closely in certain frames it’s visible just behind the flames.)
Erin considered slow motion as the best way to capture this video. If he could get the flames slowly licking around the guitar it would add an extra level of impact to the footage.
On the morning of the shoot, Erin reserved time in our video studio to figure out the camera setup and framing. He wanted to get a sense of how the background would render on camera and the general lighting setup. He measured out the distance from the camera to guitar to so we could cut down on our setup time at the training academy.
When we got to the fire department everything moved quickly; the firefighters secured the area and prepared the hose. They helped us to prop the guitar and stand on a wooden pallet and they surrounded it with kindling.
One of the firefighters lit the kindling and another kept a hose trained on it at all times. Erin filmed the guitar in 20 second bursts, followed by 30 seconds of rendering for the slow motion camera.
The space on the burn platform was small, so we had a monitor feed coming from the camera. Erin and I were constantly looking at the framing and adjusting as needed.
When the guitar finally caught flame, I couldn’t stop grinning. As the video buffered, I could see the playback: a guitar slowly being engulfed in flames — just like Jimi Hendrix at Monterey Pop but in slow motion HD.
The best part was, we weren’t finished. The charred guitar looked — and there’s no other way to put it — awesome. After Erin and I snagged a few shots of air guitaring, we headed back to the newsroom to upload the footage and move the guitar to the photo studio.
The next day Post photographer Marvin Joseph spent more than an hour lighting and relighting the guitar, making subtle changes to make the perfect photo.
He took a white backdrop, and turned it to an almost black one to create an incredibly moody image that matched the tone. It was exactly what we wanted.
