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Orcavue Creates Bullet Time Shots With One Camera

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http://youtu.be/57f5UHP9P6M

Remember how revolutionary that bullet shot in the matrix was? It was also a few dozens cameras, a full-scale Chroma room and a budget that would probably be enough for a mid-sized indie film. But the effect is totally worth it.

I guess this is why we are seeing so many creative ways of recreating this effect, from crowd-sourcing, to using “cheap” GoPros (or even RASPBERRY PIs) arrays to using a ceiling fan (really!).

Orcavue took that ceiling fan concept and made it into a product. I guess I can only describe their rig as an upside down biggish ceiling fan with a camera on its arm.

The arm on the Orcavue  revolves at 1-2 revolutions per second, and combined with a high FPS camera – say a 120FPS, $500 GoPro – it can create some cool bullet time effects. The team recommends slowing the camera even further in post (say using Twixtor) to get a really slow shot.

An Insane Rig Of 50 EOS1DX DSLRs Captures Really Expensive Bullet Time Photos

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http://youtu.be/k20m9FH74ZE

We have covered quite a bit of bullet time rigs but even the really high-end ones usually use an array of GoPros which are not the cheapest way to get a good bullet time shot but is it manageable.

A collaboration between Swiss TV station and Swiss Canon upped the game by making a bullet time rig with 50 Canon EOS 1DX DSLRs (yes that’s a 5 followed by a zero). A single one of those bodies is about $6,800 so it totals up to roughly $340,000. Oh yea, they needed lenses too. Weapon of choice was Canon’s top notch 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM. Those roughly cost $2,100 a lens. So we are looking at an additional $105,000 of lenses, bringing the total (with some memory cards, cables and 50 bubble levels) to just about half a million Dollar’s worth of gear.

This Amazing Stickbomb Bullet Time Sequence Uses Over 30,000 Stickbombs

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When you want to create an awesome car chase and don’t have the budget for it, you can always scale it down, and use RC cars. Of course, that does not mean that budget is frugal, it simply means that some stuff can not be done full scale.

The Subaru team created this incredible SUBARU “WRX STI vs StickBomb” sequence, which features a remote controlled Subaru WRX STI going through a miniature racing track battling a wave of Stick bombs. Some of the high moments of the clip feature a bullet time sequence made with an array of over 25 gopros, while the rest of the footage was shot on some highend cameras, cranes, and stabilizers.

Bullet Time With Lots And Lots Of Raspberry Pis

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We have shared many bullet time tutorials over the years, from high end, through crowd sourced to pinhole driven. This time I am happy to share a build made solely on Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi camera module.

The folks at PiFace, a company that wants kids to program again, came up with this insane 48 Raspberry Pis bullet time rig.

How 360º Lightpainting, “Bullet Time” Photos Are Made

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We have featured Eric Pare and the timecodelab before when we showcased their Liftoff 360º project (and a White Feather light painting tool). Today they released a beautiful documentary showing what goes on in a production of a 360º bullet time light painting.

Aside for the wonderful footage, the movie also tells us that Eric took over half a million pictures of contemporary dancers in the dark using light-painting techniques.

Bullet Time Rig Made With a Ceiling Fan

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Back in 1999 the Wachowskis and Keanu Reeves introduced a something new with The Matrix – Bullet time effect. The idea was to show the time flow from a bullet perspective. Since time is relative, bullets moving in mundane speeds meant everything else really slows down. This trick allowed Reeves to dodge bullets, and to ponder about the existence of spoons.

In the matrix the effect is achieved with tens of cameras shooting in succession or simultaneously, and in the final edit a sequence is made by grabbing a frame from each camera. Even today making a full 360 bullet time can be really expensive.

but for smaller objects Mark Rober found a way to spin a camera really fast to get a similar effect. Mark hooked a rig to a ceiling fan using its high speed rotation for swift camera placement. A set of lights was placed on the rig so they are stationary in relation to the camera. the last ingredient was a  GoPro Black set to shoot 240fps slow-mo. Mark was able to capture some amazing bullet time footage.

Using A Go Pro Array For Bullet Time Effect

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Marc Donahue from Perma Grin Films has quite a few tricks up his sleeve. Two of which are wonderfully demonstrated in the video below.

The first one is kinda new old trick where using an array of video cameras to create a bullet time effect. This one was shot entirely with GoPro Hero cameras mounted on (at least) two DIY rigs – a small rig that can be handheld (see 0:18) and a bigger rig that give a wider angle (see 0:50).

The other, more interesting thing for me was a technique Marc calls Lyric-Lapsing. It’s a mix between stop motion and time lapse on a talking head, and it is highly surreal (see the intro at 0:16 and the conclusion at 2:00).

[My GoPro Array | Vimeo]

(kinda) Crowdsourcing Bullet Time Dancers

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It is amazing what you can do with a little vision, even if you are pretty tied by budgetary constraints. Nate Powers and his team of students pushed their budget, and skills to the edge to create a low end (though high value) dancers bullet time shots. The challenges and work frame on this project were quite different from the ones described on a previous crowdfunded bullet time shoot, so I asked Nate to share a bit about the project.

Crowdsourcing Bullet Time

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Eeeeveryboy loves Bullet Time. Bullet Time is that magical moment in a movie when everything freezes and the camera makes a circle or a semi circle around an object. I guess it is called bullet time cuz the camera moves at the speed of a bullet.

By now, you probably know that this effect is achieved with a battery of stills camera that will set you back a small house. To achieve Bullet Time, the photographers (or Bullet time specialist) places cameras in a circle and use both a green screen and clever triggering software.

The big number of cameras are used to maintain smooth motion as the point of view moves from one camera to another.

The Triggering mechanism is used to trigger the camera one after the other in very close succession, so it would seem like time is still flowing while the POV changes.

And the green screens is used to eliminate any interference and gain control over the set.

Or….. You could crowd source it all.

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