These are some great shots and a video of Tesla Coils!:) When you go to the page, the video is on down towards the middle of the page, keep paging down...

Don

Tesla Car Theft Protection (video) 2007
At last the video. Had to hire the car on 3 different days to get lighting OK. The video is much less tolerant of low light unless the frame rate is slowed a lot. Budget was $300 for the car hire (plus pizza).

Windows media video above (3.3 MB). Slower start but higher resolution than the YouTube one below.

 YouTube video.  Lower resolution, faster start.

Playback speed was increased to 300% for the action scenes both to give a Charlie Chaplin, silent slapstick movie feel and to speed up the rather dull sparks in that light. I did try to randomly interpolate 100 frames (manually!) to give the effect of a uniform field but it wasn't convincing.
Actual rotation speed is about 10 seconds per revolution which is easy for thieves to avoid I guess.
I did night time shots with great looking sparks but there was severe motion blur with the reduced frame rate and you couldn't see the bad guy. The brightest sparks are to the dummy thief (stuffed with old blankets) who had a grounded wire in his torso.
Smoke was from a smoke generator controlled by Chris in the car and timed to smoke at the time of the sparks. It is the blue thing under the front bumper.
I wet the ground to intensify the sparks but didn't turn off the tap properly so there is a bit of a river through the scene.

http://tesladownunder.com/tesla_coil_sparks.htm#Tesladownunders%20Car%20Theft%20Protection%20%28red%20car%20version%29

Don

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