Far too often do we notice the finer things in life that we just don’t notice. I’m not talking humbly about walks on the beach or playing frisbee in park, I’m talking about slow-motion video.
What better way of seeing something than at 40x less the speed?
Have you got 360 cameras at home?
I can remember first learning the joy that came from the editing table at high school when reversing a jump we filmed from a rooftop, and then altering speeds so our dramatic scenes had chipmunk voices and falls would crunch to the ground frame by agonising frame.
It looked horrible, but nowadays you can record enough frames per second to see your muscles and bones reacting to the sudden force of concrete and shoes.
The first mainstream ‘bullet-time’ premiere in films was in Blade, but it wasn’t until The Matrix that the term was coined (John Gaeta the director credited the anime Akira as inspiration). Once Keanu Reeves showed off his 360-degree limbo dance around bullets, everything had something slow and awesome.
Stand or jump - Tough decision
Max Payne was a video game (that had its own film adaptation) that made you jump from one place to another instead of walking, purely because shooting bad guys horizontally was more fun. The TV show CSI had its own version of freeze-frame environment exploration in the premiere episode of season 10.
If you’re looking for the original and the best of slow motion gunplay, see a John Woo pre-Hollywood film like The Killer or Hard Boiled.
But this technology wasn’t just for showing cool explosions, but for science. Mythbusters loved to film something before an impact, explosion or anything else that could be slowed down.
With high-speed cameras, you can find the coolest footage of the simplest of things.
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Tags: akira, blade, John Woo, matrix, mythbusters