In a film series called “Unimpossible Missions,” GE engineers demonstrate they can do the impossible by disproving a piece of conventional wisdom. In this film, they attempt to debunk the well-known idiom “You can’t fire with fire.”

GE uses sound in a lot of innovations, including their new mammogram technology that uses ultrasound to detect early breast cancer. Using that knowledge, GE engineers believed that it might be possible to fight fire not with fire itself, but with the SOUND of fire. Their theory was that if they sampled fire sounds and then pitched these sounds low enough, the bass might be able to displace oxygen–and thus extinguish flames.

To make the experiment more interesting, the decision was made to light a stuntman on fire. And the whole experiment was filmed in 360-degree VR to ensure that nothing was concealed or cheated. Everything the viewer sees is completely real.

As the 5th film in the Unimpossible series, the production team had to up the ante. In addition, there had also been skepticism from viewers who claimed that the films were being faked. The solution was to create a 360-degree film that immerses viewers in the experiment and left little room to cheat or conceal anything.

To increase this sense of reality, we made the decision not to disguise any of the production process. Viewers can see the wires and cables, structures used for camera tracking, light rigging above, and (if they look down) they can even see the camera mount.

This was a fairly complex science experiment. To aid viewer comprehension, we filmed all the stages of the experiment in one space. As the experiment progressed, viewers found themselves being moved from one end of the warehouse to the other, experiencing a different part of the process in each stage. At any point, they could see where they’d been and where they were going, and get a sense of the structure of the experiment.

Fighting Fire With Fire reached 4.86 million viewers on Facebook and Youtube and has earned 12 million media impressions to date.