TimeSlice Combines 360° Bullet Time With Light Painting Photography

Ever since DSLRs became cheap enough we’ve been seeing our share of time slice (AKA Bullet Time) projects. And cheap gopros enable even less of an entrance barrier into the time slice world. But some projects are just pure fun and are worth sharing.

DP Mitch Martinez uses an array of 48 Canon DSLR cameras to create a full 360° circle around a model. This enables a single shot to capture the model from all angles, and to compose a bullet-time like short video.

Lighting those setups is not trivial, and if the model can not pose still (and most cant) there are some ghosting effects. Mitch tells LPP that

I love a lot of the beautiful imagery that I’ve seen lit by hand but in our video, all of the models were lit with strobes. Due to the amount of time required by some of the light painting shots, I didn’t really like some of the ghosting effects that I got when I was testing the lit by hand technique. “Lit by hand” is also a lot more complicated when filming in 360 degrees – so we went with strobes to get a nice, sharp image of the models.

another challenge was posed by the fact that doing a full 360° light painting while having the light wrap around the models is not something trivial:

I learned a lot from filming the time slice light painting video and continue to learn new things each time we work with the rig. The whole project has been a unique experience every step of the way. One of the biggest learning experiences was figuring out how to do light painting trails that wrap around and through the limbs of the model without majorly blocking any of the 48 cameras; you can’t just stand in front of the subject if the light won’t reach the camera behind you – so it’s a lot of crouching and reaching and shuffling along the floor to make sure the light can be seen from 48 cameras in the 360 degree array.

This movie shows how this huge rig is built and there is another video below showing how cool it is when spitting fire

[Time Slice | Mitch Martinez via LPP]