Cinehack at Maker Faire UK

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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.

Dave Green talking about the Cinehack project
Dave Green talking about the Cinehack project

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.

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Alasdair Allan is a scientist, author, hacker and tinkerer, who is spending a lot of his time thinking about the Internet of Things. In the past he has mesh networked the Moscone Center, caused a U.S. Senate hearing, and contributed to the detection of what was—at the time—the most distant object yet discovered.

View more articles by Alasdair Allan

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