Amazon Prime: You Are Wanted

A 72 camera rig in Berlin with a Hasselblad wired in as camera one, so the same trigger delivered the bullet time sweep and the billboard shot.

What Did We Do?

Working with German company 3DS and BDA Creative, we built a 180 degree, 8 metre diameter rig with 72 DSLR cameras at Spreegraphen Studios in Berlin, for the Amazon Prime series You Are Wanted. Getting there was one drive: Sunderland to the ferry at North Shields, across to Amsterdam, then on to Berlin.

The shot was series lead Matthias Schweighofer running past mid chase. We collaborated with the award winning photographer Andreas Franke, wiring his Hasselblad H6D into our trigger system as camera one, so the medium format camera and all 72 DSLRs fired in perfect sync. That first frame existed for a reason: billboard resolution.

Everything was captured in Canon RAW plus JPG to give the post teams maximum room to work. Over a two hour shooting window we produced 50 shots, 21 of them clean enough to go straight to the director for selection, working closely with Andreas Franke’s post production team on the alignment throughout.

The final bullet time images ran across Germany on billboards, bus stands, TV, print and online.