Steve Giralt is a Director and Visual Engineer and he created something you’ve never seen before. In creating an concept ad for a deconstructed burger, Giralt went to insane lengths to execute his idea. The challenge was to capture the components of the burger, coming together by suspending, then leveraging the awesomeness that is gravity to create motion, which resulted in the final constructed burger when it lands with perfection.
To start with, you need to watch the final product, then we’ll look at how it was done.
The creative engineer first built a 3D model of the rig in Sketchup, before 3D printing the parts of a double catapault, which was then connected servo motors to an Arduino controller that shot the mustard and ketchup into the air, colliding at exactly the right point to create drama. The next challenge was creating a collapsable tower that was able to suspend the delicious meat topped with cheese, bacon, pickles, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, and of course sesame bun in mid-air.
To do this, Giralt used elastic bands that were severed at exactly the right time as to fly out of the shot just in time. This revealed the components against a clean background and was all done in real time, with no special effects or Photoshop magic in post production.
Maybe the most impressive piece of the puzzle, certainly the most expensive was the robot arm that held the camera. With a process that needed to be repeatable, Giralt leveraged the arm to pre-program a motion path that enabled the super fast action to remain in frame and in focus. Amazingly the final shot was capture in just a few takes.
Now do yourself a favour and check out the full behind the scenes video, it’s certainly worth the 4 minutes of your time.
Because Giralt needs to do this kind of camera trickery often, he actually built a portable system called Precision Arduino Timing Relay imaging Controller (P.A.T.R.I.C). This gives him the capacity to time elements of a shoot perfectly with camera movements.
Via Long Zheng.
