I’ve got another upcoming project which has been on my plate for a while, but I haven’t had the chance to say much about it until now.

You may remember a breakdown I posted last year…. It was a particularly rough and crappy attempt at a time-slice shot. It’s finally time to do this again, but properly.

I learnt a lot of lessons looking back on last time, and, this time around, I have every confidence that this one will be done properly, with care, and will give a stunning final result.

The shot in question involves a woman throwing a glass of wine over her husband in the middle of an argument in a restaurant. It starts as an over the shoulder shot of her as she throws the wine. The camera follows the wine as it flies through the air, ending on a reverse angle shot on him as it hits him in the face.

I’m going to be keeping this blog updated with news and progress as we go through pre-production and into the shoot.

Unlike the last time, this shoot will be doing with an array of approximately 30 digital stills cameras. This will involve a lot more planning in terms of positioning and triggering them.

The current plan involves the following:

1. Previz - I need to know the exact positioning for each of the stills cameras, plus what point in actual time each camera needs to go off at. Because of the potential complexity of the shoot, I’m going to be doing a few options, ranging from a relatively simple “fire them all at the same time” shot through to one where time will appear to slow down before suddenly jerking back to motion.
2. Sourcing the cameras - I have plans for this - more when I know. Eventually, I just need about 30 identical stills cameras. More news soon, hopefully.
3. Triggering the cameras - I have a friend who is currently building me a triggering system for the cameras. This will allow me to set each camera off with a pre-determined delay on a per-camera basis. This will allow me to have much more control over the apparent movement in the final shot. This is being worked on at the moment - once it’s finished, I’ll post more details on it.
4. Assistants - I’m going to need a lot of them. I’ve not started looking yet, as we don’t have a definite shoot date yet, but with that many cameras, I want to have enough people to keep a close eye on all of them - I don’t want to discover later that there are cameras that haven’t been going off properly or have the wrong settings.

For the moment, that’s about it - we’re hoping to shoot this in a month or two’s time - it’s giving us lots of time to get everything organised in advance - we all want this to work well, and, as a low-budget project, we’ve got the luxury of being able to take time over it.

Keep an eye on the blog for more info - I’ve created a category specifically for the time-slice posts - you can see all of them here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 13:31 and is filed under Time-Slice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.