The original “bullet time” special effect from the Matrix was created with a series of cameras in a circle, each triggered in turn. Mark Rober (who has been featured on the blog before) created a cool hack to create the bullet time effect with a ceiling fan. Jeremiah Warren created his own rig based on Rober’s idea:
The obvious “cheat” to this is to get a high speed camera and build a rig that will spin it around the subject, but this also has limitations. High speed cameras are still expensive, they weigh a lot, and building spinning rigs out of metal is also expensive. A friend sent me a video by Mark Rober who came up with the idea of using a ceiling fan as the spinning rig, and a GoPro 3 for the high speed camera (which shoots up to 240fps). I decided to implement this idea, but instead of mounting the fan upside-down, mount it the correct way so I could film larger subject matters.
[via EMSL]
ADVERTISEMENT
