Rafael Nadal Santander (Banesto) Bank

Banesto Bank

Cameras, up from 36 in four days

1,200

Miles driven to Bilbao

Serves captured at around 130mph

Friday afternoon: a 36 camera rig in the North of England. Tuesday night: an 80 camera rig in Bilbao, ready for Rafael Nadal.

What Did We Do?

The ask: build an 80 camera bullet time rig in Spain by Tuesday. The reality: it was Friday afternoon, we were in the North of England with a 36 camera rig, and the country was in the middle of a postal strike.

No photography shop had 44 spare Canon DSLRs, and with the couriers overwhelmed by the strike nobody could ship them in time. So we spent three days driving over 500 miles around the UK, buying cameras one and two at a time from every shop we could find. The rig also needed 50 more of our custom camera clamps, each machined by an engineering firm. Persuading them to work the weekend cost us a large crate of beer.

Flying a rig this size with no margin for lost cargo was not a risk worth taking, so we drove the 1,200 miles to Bilbao. At the venue we waited 15 hours while the other companies set up and a blacksmith finished the structure the cameras would mount to. We started work at 9pm Tuesday and went through the nights on pizza and chocolate. By the time Rafael Nadal’s helicopter landed on the roof, the largest and most advanced bullet time rig in Europe at that time was standing underneath him.

We shot 42 movies of Nadal serving at full speed, around 130mph. The scene was dressed with reference objects for the 3D animators, and our master computer was networked straight into the post production crew, so each take was downloaded, rendered and shown to the director and client on site minutes after it happened. The venue was the Bilbao Exhibition Centre, the largest multipurpose hall in Spain. One extra detail: the power feed we were given had no earth, so we drove a bar into the car park and earthed the rig to that.