BULLET-TIME

Bullet-time — a moment held still

Twenty-four cameras fire at once and the moment freezes in the frame. The captured stills are assembled automatically into a short MP4 or GIF with the smoothness of a cinema shot.

Every participant walks away with a personal video — striking, branded and ready to post.

Challenges and goals

Project overview

We create the sense of a three-dimensional space held in frozen time. The moment is fixed, but the camera keeps moving. That is what produces the depth: space and time visually separate, and the effect on the viewer is remarkable.

The technique was first used in The Matrix, where the creative brief was to show Neo learning to control the space and time of a virtual world.

Technically the effect relies on a large number of cameras firing simultaneously, each capturing one five-hundredth of a second. We take a single frame from each camera and place them in sequence, which produces a smooth camera move while the subject stays perfectly still.

Our rig is light and mobile. We use 24 DSLRs, and they can be mounted in many configurations: on circles of different diameters, on semicircles, in a straight line, vertically or horizontally. The height of the whole truss is adjustable, and it can be made to move by mounting it on a motion platform. The variations are endless — the only limits are the brief and your imagination.

We assemble the captured frames into the final sequence quickly: about 20 seconds per clip on average. That means the guest sees the result immediately — a 15-second video lands in their inbox right away — and gets the emotional payoff on the spot. Over an eight-hour day we can shoot and process around 300 finished clips.

We can deliver finished video for every social platform (Instagram, Facebook and the rest), or hand over the RAW files for further CG work.

The effect adapts to virtually any field. We are a creative team, and we enjoy finding an interesting answer to whatever problem you bring us.

Results

The booth has run at more than a hundred events in Ukraine and abroad, and we have established a branch operation in Georgia.