England Cricket Team

A call reached us in Macau; the rig was up in London before the England men's and women's cricket teams arrived the next morning.

What Did We Do?

We were working in Macau when the call came asking for help with a film featuring both the men’s and women’s England cricket teams. So we cancelled the wind down days at the end of the China job, changed the flights, and flew straight from Hong Kong to London, landing just in time to build the rig, on heroic jet lag, before the players arrived the next morning.

The setup used 120 degrees of an 8 metre diameter system. We travelled with 80 cameras, used 61 of them, and put a Canon C300 at each end of the arc to capture the movement before and after the frozen moment.

The interesting part was the triggering. Our controllable trigger system fires the cameras individually with timing accurate to 1/10,000th of a second, so instead of one simultaneous burst, the cameras can fire sequentially along the path, and the firing speed can ramp from fast to slow or slow to fast. We changed the patterns on the fly between takes without interrupting the shoot at all.

From trigger to fully aligned preview took about 12 seconds, so the director reviewed every take on set moments after it happened. We delivered in 6K, giving the edit room to punch in digitally and still hold 4K.