Traditional photo booths at weddings are old news. Sebastian Staacks, who describes himself as someone who loves to "create stuff," built a bullet time video booth for his cousin's wedding.
The 2021 US Open golf championship kicks off today, and if you pay attention to the broadcast, you may notice a neat new camera technology that has been deployed. This year, the sixth hole at Torrey Pines features an array of 88 cameras to capture the players' swings in Matrix-style "bullet time."
Famed bullet-time expert Eric Paré decided to challenge himself by building an experimental bullet-time rig using the Raspberry Pi Camera Module V2, a tiny 8-megapixel camera. While he encountered a few problems with the rig, he eventually got the 15 cameras working together without using custom electronic components.
The Hydraulic Press YouTube channel is already an entertaining (if occasionally painful) watch. Who doesn't want to see things get crushed and/or explode... in slow motion? But the channel recently took it up another notch by setting up a ring of 72 high-speed cameras to capture some awesome bullet-time slow-motion footage.
Want to shoot a "bullet time" shot but don't have an ultra-expensive camera array or high-speed camera? Here's a 27-second video showing a brilliantly cheap and easy way you can create the same effect with any video camera.
Daniel DeArco has created what he claims to be the "world's fastest camera slider." Capable of sliding 5 feet in just 0.15 seconds, this thing is pretty darn fast - check out what it can do in the 3-minute demo above.
Here's a new 3-minute music video by Russian/Ukrainian group 5'Nizza. In it, the band finds themselves in a variety of situations, but as the action is frozen they keep on singing while the camera pans around them. How was it done? It turns out the effect was created with a single moving camera and a green screen.
We've seen a lot of creative setups for faking that 'bullet time' look—one guy strapped his GoPro to a ceiling fan—but this creation filmmaker Luca Amhofer is the most versatile and functional DIY rig of its kind we've ever seen... and it's dirt cheap to make!
Remember that camera we found on YouTube a few months back? The same one that just smashed its Kickstarter goal? Yeah... it's awesome. And this demo by Applied Sciences shows you one reason why: pseudo bullet time.
We won't waste time hemming and hawing: this is just plain cool. Using a patented technology, Satellite Lab can move a light source around an object at 10,000 feet per second while capturing that same object in super slow motion, creating an effect we'll call "bullet time 2.0".
For the Adobe MAX 2015 conference in Los Angeles back in October 2015, Adobe invited photographer Eric Paré to create a 360-degree light painting photo booth for attendees to experience.
Skier Nicolas Vuignier recently shared a viral video in which he created "bullet time" footage of himself skiing by swinging an iPhone 6 around his head using a special contraption he built himself.
The original 3-minute video can be seen above, in case you haven't watched it yet. It amassed well over 3.5 million views in just a couple of weeks.
Matrix-style "bullet time" is usually created using an array of cameras placed all around a subject. Swiss professional skier Nicolas Vuignier has been testing a new technique that only uses a single camera: he swings his iPhone 6 camera around using a long rope.
Vuignier calls his iPhone experiment the "Centriphone." The video above contains some awesome shots he made using it while speeding down snow-covered mountain slopes.
For his master thesis project at Hochschule Mannheim in Germany, photographer and communication designer Andreas Neumann decided to create bullet time animations using analog photography. He ended up creating a camera ring composed of 100 individual pinhole cameras for the project, titled Orbita 13.
In addition to running a giant stock footage archive of over 1,500 4K clips, Philadelphia-based DOP Mitch Martinez also shoots Time Slice, or Matrix-style Bullet Time, footage.
The video above shows slow-motion and bullet-time footage of firebreathers spewing fireballs. It was captured using a rig of 48 DSLRs, a RED Epic, and a Panasonic GH4.
What happens when you combine the art of light painting with fifty Olympus OM-D E-M10 mirrorless cameras? The team at ZOLAQ in Germany wanted to know just that. Teaming up with Olympus and design agency ‘Bird Like’, the team created the 2-minute video above, titled ‘Bullet Time’.
The "bullet time" effect popularized by the 1999 film The Matrix is generally done by arranging a large number of still cameras on a circular track, so most of the rigs out there cost quite a bit of money to put together. A Columbia University researcher named Yan Wang is trying to make bullet-time imaging more accessible. With his CamSwarm technology, all you need is a group of friends who have smartphones or tablets.
Photographer Tyler Johnson built his own bullet time rig using 27 GoPro HERO Black cameras and captured some awesome footage of a fire breather doing his thing on a roof in San Francisco.
Simon Byrnes of The Pixelist operates a time-freezing camera array consisting of 140 Canon 1100D (AKA the Rebel T3) DSLRs. One client has been the UK show Got To Dance, for which the cameras are used to capture bullet-time sequences of dancers. During a period when the TV show was off air, Byrnes decided to have some fun with the rig and captured some shots that became the video above. It's titled "The Timefreezers."
Custom-built 20-GoPro array and Red Epic camera in tow, Marc Donahue of PermaGrin Films recently spent some time at San Diego UNITED Training Center to capture breakdancers, parkour athletes and gymnasts performing complex acrobatics in slow motion and bullet time.
Bullet time isn't anything new, but where most of the recent examples show how you can use relatively inexpensive phones or GoPros to create the effect, this BTS video shows how Canon helped put together a crazy bullet time photo shoots that went radically in the other direction.
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.
Check out this trippy video showing New York City sidewalks in Matrix-style "bullet time." It was created by filmmaker Paul Trillo, who partnered up with Microsoft to create a special camera rig consisting of 50 individual Nokia Lumia 1020 smartphones mounted to an arc.
What happens when you combine an RC car, some "stick bombs" and more camera gear than you can shake...er...blow up a stick at? You get this insane creation by Subaru.
Rest easy, future astronauts. If occasional filmmaker and full-time tinkerer Mark Rober and his pals are any indication, NASA engineers can MacGyver their way into or out of any situation.
A couple of days ago, we shared the news that NBC's Sunday Night Football was going to show you pro football like you've never seen it before: in bullet time. Details were a bit thin, but it looked like a 24-camera bullet time rig would be installed in each end zone, providing Matrix-like replays that would do their best to blow your mind.
As it turns out, the technology is called 'freeD' and was developed by Replay Technologies. And Patrick Myles of Teledyne DALSA (the company providing the 4K cameras for the system) got in touch with us to share some of the juicy details, which we now get to pass along to you.
Sunday Night Football is about to get a lot more fun to watch. Not even two months after we shared the news that the folks over at NHK had put together a robotic bullet time rig that could shoot 360° slow-motion replays, NBC has announced its plan to bring matrix-style replays to the world of pro football.
Creating time-slices (better known as the bullet time effect) where you freeze a moment in time and move around your subject is an expensive thing. It's expensive mainly because it requires that you have several cameras at your disposal.
Photographer Jeremiah Warren didn't have multiple cameras, but he did have a ceiling fan, a two-by-four and a GoPro Hero3, so he built a makeshift "bullet time" DIY rig and made do.
The folks over at NHK's (the Japan Broadcasting Corporation's) Science & Technology Research Laboratory have developed a groundbreaking multi-viewpoint, motion-controlled camera rig that could very soon be changing the way we view sports, among many other potential applications.
The rig is a robotically controlled system that links one camera to eight sub-cameras, all of which are pointing at the same thing. Basically, it's a bullet time rig that moves, enabling the people behind the lenses to take the technique of timeslicing to new heights.
We've featured the work of Eric Paré, Patrick Rochon and Timecode Lab before. Using a 24 DSLR fully circular bullet time rig developed by Rochon, Paré and Timecode put together some really cool light-painting projects. One of these was LightSpin: an art project that captured dancers using an awe-inspiring combination of light painting, bullet time and stop motion.
In the past we had only a few behind the scenes details to share with you. Fortunately, Paré recently decided to release the 8 minute "documentary" above in order to explain exactly what all goes into shooting his creations.
We've featured quite a few "bullet time" projects in the past that involve freezing time using rigs of tens or hundreds of cameras, but have you ever seen the technique done with pinhole cameras? That's what you'll see in the music video shown above. It's for the song "Wasting My Young Years" by London Grammar.
Portugal’s Krypton Films, in collaboration with production company Moonlighting and marine support company Frog Squad, recently succeeded in filming what they claim to be South Africa's first ever underwater time slice for an Aqua Das Pedras mineral water commercial.
In order to shoot the best Rolls Royce Wraith launch film possible, Angus Elliott and company pulled out all of the stops. In addition to using some very nice video cameras and all-around great filmmaking, they also wanted to shoot a bullet time sequence, for which they set up a 100 DSLR array. By their reckoning, that's the largest DSLR array shot in Europe.
Fortunately, filmmaker Jack Flynn was there to capture the process in action, and in the video above he gives us a behind the scenes peek at the making of the Rolls Royce Wraith launch video.
Want to shoot insanely cool Matrix-style "bullet time" footage at home? You can do so with a single rig built out of relatively cheap components.
NASA spaceship engineer Mark Rober came up with a brilliant way to shoot eye-popping imagery using just a GoPro camera and a cheap ceiling fan.
One of the interesting ideas involving slow motion cameras (i.e. high speed cameras) is to move the camera very quickly during shots, resulting in footage that looks like the camera is moving in real time while everything in the shot moves in slow motion. Last year we shared an incredible demo reel by German studio The Marmalade, which uses this technique.
Caleb Kraft over at Hack A Day was inspired by this concept and by the bullet-time rigs that have gotten quite a bit of press lately, and decided to try his hand at moving slow-mo footage using a single GoPro.
You might remember PermaGrin Films' Marc Donahue from his amazing "Dream Music: Part 2" lyric-lapse video that took 6 hours of work for every 3 seconds of footage. We even shared a behind the scenes look at how that time-lapse was put together, complete with deleted scenes and director commentary.
Chilean visual artist Felipe Baeza is doing some pretty interesting work with Matrix-style camera rigs. Instead of bullet time videos, Baeza uses his rig to create 3D portraits of subjects that can then be displayed in augmented reality or through a 3D model viewer.
Last week we shared a guest post by photographer Martin Legeer on how he built a Matrix-style bullet-time camera rig using 50 Canon DSLRs. Shortly afterward, Greek photographer Theodoros Tziatzios of Real Creations sent an email telling us about his own camera rig projects, which use double the number of cameras.
That's right: a camera rig with 100 cameras for extremely smooth 360-degree views of subjects that freeze time and space.
Back in March, a client for whom I’ve done some light consulting work asked me if it was possible to capture a 360-degree-image that can be rotated afterwards. I said of course, but didn’t think that much about the consequences -- it's a project that would wake me up at nights for the next few months.
For their project 24x360, Patrick Rochon, Timecode Lab, and Eric Paré combined a 360-degree "bullet time" rig with light painting and produced some pretty sweet results. The short teaser above shows some of the pieces they created.