Surfing in Bullet-Time

Recently, Rip Curl, the famous surf wear maker, realized an advertising campaign called "Mirage" with a video shot in "Bullet-Time". Bulle-Time is the effect that may had first saw in the videogame "Max Payne" and then in the movie "The Matrix", but in reality it's an old (at least as a concept) photographic technique also known as "Time Slice": The bullet time effect was achieved photographically by a set of still cameras
surrounding the subject. These arrays are usually triggered at once or sequentially. Singular frames taken from each of the still cameras are then arranged and displayed consecutively to produce an orbiting viewpoint of an action frozen in time or as hyper-slow-motion. This technique suggests the limitless perspectives and variable frame rates possible with a virtual camera. However, if the still array process is done with real cameras, it is often limited to assigned paths. In this case they used a camera array of 52 Canon Rebel DSLRs in order to capture the same shot from 52 different angles, stringing them together with a software for the final footage.




Here’s the finished video:



and here there's a very intersting behind-the-scenes video where you can apreciate the bullet-time technique: