Slow Mo Guys team up with Steve Giralt to film super fast robots in super slow motion

I wondered how long it’d be before these two did some kind of collaboration and now it’s finally here. We’re big fans of The Slow Mo Guys here at DIYP, who use Phantom cameras to show us events recorded in super slow motion, letting us see new things that our eyes simply aren’t capable of spotting in real-time. As well as the obvious visual appeal, the insights into physics and how things work is just fascinating.

Somebody else we’re big fans of is Steve Giralt. We’ve featured Steve’s work on DIYP a number of times. He also shoots slow motion with Phantom cameras, but he mounts them onto the end of super fast Bolt robot arms for commercial work. Gav from The Slow Mo Guys visited Steve and his team in New York to see how the whole system works and to create some pretty epic slow-motion shots.

The video isn’t on the main Slow Mo Guys channel and is instead on their secondary channel. As Gav explains, he felt that the behind the scenes was so interesting that it deserved a longer video than they typically show on the main channel. He wanted it to be more than just a few pretty visuals and it certainly is that, going into quite some depth into how the robots work and how to overcome some of the technical challenges they often face. In fact, the moves used in this video were something that the team had never tried before, so we get to see a bit of their thought process and workflow on how they figure stuff out.

Of particular interest was Steve’s lighting system. Some of Steve’s lights may feature familiar brand names like Nanlite, but they’re all custom. They’ve been modified to be able to strip down the size and weight and to add water cooling for longer shoots. Some of the lights are completely custom, built from scratch by Steve and his team and all of them have full remote control capabilities. Steve’s actually posted a video to his own channel which is part of a series on building LED lights.

As for the robots… Well, they’re pretty insane. But you’ll just have to watch the video to see those in action. The tech geekery in this one is even more exciting than the slow-mo footage!