BICEP & Clark, Viper (feat. Saskia)

Bullet time for the official video for BICEP & Clark's Viper (feat. Saskia), directed by Ryan Doubiago, produced by CANADA, and released on Ninja Tune as part of Air / Lemonder / Viper.

We shot over two days this summer with two rigs: our Argus rig of 45 cinema cameras and a straight line of 84 DSLR cameras, in a metal barn and a field just outside High Wycombe. Every move in the film was captured on real cameras, with no CG and no generative AI, and some conventional retiming in the edit.

How it started

The director, Ryan Doubiago, rang us from San Francisco on a Friday evening as we were leaving the office, on the off chance, with a lot of questions about what bullet time could do and how to make his ideas work. Davey Ahern at CANADA got in touch soon after. Over the following weeks we had long video calls working through ideas, and Ryan came over to England so we could plan it in person.

The barn: 45 Argus rig cine cameras

In the barn we set the Argus rig on a 14 metre circle, with 45 cameras spaced evenly around 180 degrees of it.

We chose Argus because every camera films continuously, at 4K and 120 frames a second, all in sync. A stills rig records one instant, whereas Argus records the whole take from every angle. That means the moment, the camera move and even the shutter speed can all be chosen after the shoot instead of being fixed on the night.

Chris Cunningham did long exposure bullet time beautifully years ago. We needed 45 cinema cameras, 84 stills cameras and a summer of new software to have a go at it.

Recording everything is what made the long exposures possible. Some of the shots are 10 second exposures built from the footage: 1,200 frames from each camera, or 54,000 frames for a single move, combined into one image per camera so light and movement trail across the frame as the view travels round.

The line: 84 stills cameras

For the crowd shots we built a straight line of 84 Canon stills cameras, all firing at exactly the same moment.

The finished shot looks like one long move travelling past a party, but the cameras never moved. Between takes we rearranged the people and vehicles in front of the line and shot again, over and over, and the edit joins those takes into one continuous journey along the crowd.

On some takes the cameras were set to 4 second exposures, so the blur in those frames is a true long exposure captured in camera.

Our alignment software had been written for curved rigs, so we rebuilt it for a straight line of cameras to keep every frame steady.

The software

We expanded Argus Suite, our own software for running the rigs and making the movies, a great deal for this project. The main additions were:

• Long exposures made after the shoot, by stacking frames from each camera, up to 30 seconds
• Motion blur and exposure ramps, where the blur changes from camera to camera as the view moves
• A new pattern system for designing camera moves, with freezes, orbits, speed ramps and sweeps
• A live view and an iPad page for the director, to watch takes as they land, grade them and pin notes to exact frames
• A one-click check of the whole rig before each take, so a problem shows up before it costs a shot
• Renders about ten times faster than when we started
• A record kept with every movie of which camera and frame each picture came from, so notes between the edit and us are exact
• Perform, which lets someone steer the camera move by hand on an iPad, built for this job
• Argus Suite Mini, described below

Handing the edit team the controls

The edit team at Cabin and the post production team at Selected Works received the raw footage along with Argus Suite Mini, a version of our software that runs on their own computers. It uses the same render engine we use, includes the alignment from the shoot, and lets them choose the moment, the move, the speed and the length of exposure themselves. They made their own outputs from the raw files without having to send requests back to us and wait.

Mini works offline and uploads nothing, so the footage stays on the client’s own machines.