Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Chris Vanderschaaf is a cinematographer specializing in slow motion video. He goes to the world armed with a Phantom Flex4K to capture amazing footage (check out @chrisvtv).
Today though, Chris shares with DIYP readers some of the tests he regularly makes to show how different frame rates affect final footage.
Some of the tests are absolutely stunning, especially when they involve liquids, fire or explosions that are hard to fully see with the naked eye.
We’ve all seen those fancy slow-motion food videos with ingredients slamming into each other in midair. Such videos often require expensive rigs involving multiple motion control robots that cost more than your house. But you don’t necessarily need to spend quite that much to start having a go at this kind of thing yourself.
After watching some of Steve Giralt’s work, the guys from Syrp were inspired to try it with a couple of their Magic Carpet sliders and Genie Mini heads to see if they could pull off a food video that had a similar look. I think they managed to do it quite well, and they were able to control the whole setup from just an iPad.
iPhone 11 was announced earlier this month, and it’s all about the camera(s). It’s aimed at mobile photographers, filmmakers, and of course – selfie-takers. The latest iPhone has slow-motion capabilities on the front camera so you can take slow-motion selfies, or as Apple calls them, “slofies.” Apple seems to like their made-up term so much, that they have applied for a US trademark.
Steve Giralt is pretty well known for pushing things to the extreme when it comes to super slow-motion video. This time, though, he’s gone way overboard, by making a rig that spins a Phantom VEO 4K high-speed camera around a platform at 150 revolutions per minute.
The rig was made to film Jack Daniel’s Honey. They wanted to show a piece of lime spinning as it was falling into the drink as the whole thing was rotating around in front of the camera. Naturally, they couldn’t easily spin the lime as it fell, and they couldn’t really spin the drink, so the solution was obvious. Spin the camera.
It’s difficult for me to imagine that anything can move slowly on the busy streets of New York. But thanks to his super slo-mo video, filmmaker Glen Vivaris made people and cars appear almost as they’re frozen in time. All it took was a smartphone and an idea, and the result looks like a tense and almost surreal movie scene.
Every new Slow Mo Guys video just makes me go “wow!”. Seething every day things shot at tens or hundreds of thousand frames per second and then massively slowed down just reveals such amazing things. It might be something incredibly beautiful, or funny, or just plain fascinating to watch.
One thing they get asked about regularly, though, is to film light itself. A seemingly impossible task, but now they’ve done it, using a camera that shoots at an extremely crazy 10,000,000,000,000 frames per second.
This video from the Insuurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) takes us behind the scenes to see their camera rigs for shooting video and stills of car crashes. The footage and photos they produce are used to help make vehicles safer in the event of a crash, but it’s also used a lot for other research and it’s even appeared in movies.
It takes a whole lot of rather technical planning and preparation to get each shot and to be able to repeat it with multiple vehicles over a period of time. Every camera is calibrated, measured and positioned very exactly to be able to reproduce the same shot days or even months apart.
Shooting “bullet time” usually requires expensive gear. But if you’re on a really low budget, you can fake this effect without spending a dime. All you need is the camera you already have, and a little help from the people you’re filming.
As a newbie filmmaker, one of the first things you should master is the frame rate. Different frame rates affect your shots, and you should choose it wisely depending on what you want to achieve. In this video, filmmaker Chris Vanderschaaf shows how four different frame rates affect bottle shots. So if you need to shoot some commercial videos, this can be a great visual guideline.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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