Cinehack at Maker Faire UK

This post is coming to you live from Maker Faire UK being held this weekend at the Life Science Centre here in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

The Cinehack project is all about the stuff they won’t teach you at film school, and like a lot of maker projects Cinehack was born through necessity.

Renting — let alone buying — professional quality film equipment is prohibitively expensive. But if you want a certain shot, then you need the right equipment, and if you can’t afford to rent it, then you have to build it.

I talked to Dave Green — from Newcastle University, and one of the people behind Cinehack — about the project, what they’re building, and why they’re building it.

We’ve seen really good uses of off-the-shelf maker technology to replicate hugely expensive film kit before, for instance the Frozen Raspberry — a bullet-time rig built from 48 individual Raspberry Pi boards, each with a Pi camera module attached, arranged in a circle and set up to take pictures simultaneously — but Cinehack takes it all the way back to basics. Their slider rig consists of some copper pipe, some plastic tubing, and a couple of plastic t-junctions, and costs significantly less than $10 to build.