Meanwhile, the skaters, Leo and Cam, would be waiting in the middle of the camera ring in the dark, ready for our word to go. Once we were ready to start each set-up, we sealed off our black-painted studio Eric and Nico loaded the film in darkness, working by touch and constant communication. But then in order to avoid exposing the film prematurely… we had to load the film and shoot in pitch black. So that meant that we had to use a faster, but panchromatic stock, and we settled on 250 ASA Double X. But upon testing, we found that we couldn’t pump in enough light to expose the image since 100’ rolls of orthochromatic film topped out at 25 ASA! I’d planned on shooting this on orthochromatic film so that we could use a safelight while shooting. Our pinholes were always open the strobes themselves acted as the shutter mechanism. To make things even more interesting: Our cameras had no shutter. After testing and a lot of math, we landed on four 2400w strobes. Especially since I wanted to shoot in a black-painted studio to create a disconnected and high-contrast feeling. This meant that, in order to create enough light to make an image without a long exposure, we needed a lot of power. So we needed to freeze just a single moment, in order to make a legible 360 degree skate photo. However, that doesn’t work with skateboarding, since a long exposure would just make a blur. The reason: it’s effectively a lens with a very small aperture, meaning that you need a ton of light to make an image. What were the technical challenges that setup created and how did you mitigate those?Ī pinhole camera is usually exposed with a long exposure, in daylight. We wanted our FOV to be as wide as possible, so each camera resulted in a panoramic 12-perf frame on 35mm. Then he and Nico de Miranda made the plans, and actually made the damn thing! It resulted in 104 pinhole cameras in a seven foot diameter, and 21 foot circumference. Who took the reins in creating the camera setup?Įric Schleicher, the DP, took the reins to figure out a wide-angle pinhole camera, something we hadn’t seen before, that would feel like a new take on the familiar lensing for skateboarding photography. So in the end, we were certainly not the first to ever play with this technique, and built on the backs of other great artists, like Macmillian and Bison. I thought up this concept: bullet time, exposed along a single strip of film.Īs we went further down the road to figuring out our process and toward production, we found further projects that had also been built on Tim’s ideas, like Bison’s video for London Grammar’s Wasting My Young Years. He was the innovator whose work and ideas inspired and led to bullet time being used in the Matrix films, etc. And I soon discovered that this technique had been pioneered in the 1980s by an artist named Tim Macmillan, in a series called Time-Slice, and was awed by what he accomplished. But of course, in 2021, just about everything has been done before. I was really excited after I first ‘invented’ the pinhole idea as a way to freeze skating, and started trying to figure out how exactly it would be possible. Muybridge’s work was an inspiration for the look and feel, as was the Nine Inch Nails’ video Closer by Romanek, its raw feel.Īfter thinking up a unique concept like this, what are the next steps in bringing it to life? So I’d been playing around with other ideas to explore this frozen analog world with skating a little more when I thought up this concept: bullet time, exposed along a single strip of film. I’ve experimented before with analog bullet time using a bunch of camcorders of various tape formats, as well as a few different styles of freezing time with skateboarding from multiple angles. Where did the idea for a bullet time infused skateboarding video come from?
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