Magic Morphing: Setting Freeze Frames into Motion

Scott Anderson
June 2001

A student's idea to infuse frozen instants in time with visual movement led to a new cutting-edge Hollywood effect.
You've seen the effect: the action freezes, and the videocamera magically moves around the frozen moment. Tossed water, speeding bullets and Super Bowl football players were all suspended in time while the camera moved around the scene. It's called bullet-time or flow-mo, but how is it accomplished? In this article, we'll not only show you how the pros do it when money is no object, but we'll show you how to mimic this amazing effect on your own home computer.

The video maneuver can be traced back to 1980, when British art student Tim Macmillan was experimenting with cubism and photography. At the time, he was simultaneously shooting action subjects from two or three different angles and then combining the photos into a collage.

Macmillan's collages represented the same instant in time, but from different points of view. A puff of smoke and a splash of water took on the feel of 3D when viewed from different angles. The more angles, it seemed, the better.

Then something snapped in his head, and he dreamed up a camera that would simultaneously take hundreds of shots from different points of view. All he needed was about 100 tightly synchronized cameras. As an impoverished student, that was out of Macmillan's league. But he was resourceful.

He cut a groove down the middle of a 2-by-2 board and painted it, his "camera," black. In a darkroom, he layered a roll of 16mm film into the groove and then a strip of clear plastic as a spacer to give the camera a focal length. On top of that, he placed an opaque tape punched with pinhole "lenses." Finally, he encased the whole thing to make a light-proof shutter. He took it into the studio for a photo shoot and asked his subject to jump in the air. He tripped the shutter and simultaneously exposed every frame on the film strip.

When Macmillan developed the film and saw what he had done, he put aside any ideas of a collage. Instead, he threaded the film into the nearest projector. Incredibly, the sequence of photos showed a scene that was both alive and dead at the same time. They seemed alive with unexpected camera motion, but the movie's subjects were actually frozen dead in space.

It looked as if Macmillan had grabbed a high-speed camera, strapped a rocket to his back and shot a very slow-mo movie of his subject as he blasted past. Time was frozen, but the camera seemed free to roam.

Macmillan understood what had happened. Since all the frames were exposed at once, the subject didn't have a chance to move. Instead, each frame caught a slightly different perspective of a man frozen in mid-air. When the film was played back, each frame, shot from a slightly different position, created a virtual camera movement.

The young photographer was elated. His experiments were still primitive, but he could easily see the potential. He persevered and created new cameras. He begged Kodak for surplus lenses, and to their credit, they honored his request.Macmillan built a circular camera cluster that could record a 360-degree fly-around. This finally got him some attention. In 1993, a BBC program called Tomorrow's World featured a freeze frame movie of a dog leaping (with a little help) through the middle of the circular camera. Instantly, people all around the country, worried sick about the dead dog they thought they saw on TV, flooded the switchboard.

Macmillan was forced to do other things to make ends meet, but eventually he came back to the technique, and developed even larger camera systems. He formed a company called Time-Slice Films and started to get assignments.

But there was still a problem. Tweak as he might, it was impossible to get all the cameras pointed at exactly the same spot, with exactly the same exposure. The results were jiggly, which was fine for an artsy look, but didn't excite professional filmmakers.

Fortunately, people in the computerized morphing and warping business were looking beyond the standard morph shot.

In 1996, Discreet Logic introduced a product called Flame that could track objects, stabilize them and add extra in-between frames to stretch the action. It gave Macmillan the smoothness he needed. He was ready for the big time.

In 1999, Macmillan used his "time-slice" technique in the movie Wing Commander. According to the plot, the ship travels through one of those pesky space anomalies and time gets frozen. This was the perfect scenario for Macmillan. Armed with tracking and morphing software and a new camera collection, he made a "virtual camera" circle around a frozen-in-time crew, complete with floating fluids.

It was an eye-catcher. Macmillan had finally made it.

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