Capturing Bullet Time on Film with 364 Separate Pinhole Cameras

What kind of project would you dedicate six months of your life to? For photographer Brandon Griffiths, the answer was “pinhole bullet time photography.” His recently completed project took him a whopping 4382 hours to complete from start to finish.

Using a custom-built rig of 364 pinhole cameras, Griffiths created the video above showing Matrix-style bullet time done completely with analog photography.

The rig was built out of long wooden pieces fashioned to expose strips of 35mm film — almost 200 feet of film was used to capture 1024 individual pinhole photos.

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With much film comes much developing and processing. The darkroom portion of this project required 5 gallons each of developer, stop, and fix. After 14 hours of developing the photos, 100 hours was spent scanning the photos to digitize them.

There weren’t any during the actual photography, since everything was done in a completely blacked out room with 6 Bowens lighting kits.

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Contact Sheet

Here’s a behind-the-scenes photograph showing the project during its various stages:

Last year we shared a similar project that involved 625 pinhole cameras and a bullet time music video. That one, however, was presumably done with a much larger team and a much more flexible budget.


Image credits: Photographs and videos by Brandon Griffiths and used with permission

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