Sophie Clements: How We Fall

Cement dust frozen by 96 cameras firing milliseconds apart, for How We Fall, Sophie Clements' Barbican commission.

What Did We Do?

Artist Sophie Clements asked us to build a large array to capture cement particles mid air for How We Fall, the second part of her commission for the Barbican’s foyer series. The film uses cement, the raw stuff of concrete, as a symbol of construction and destruction, echoing the fabric of the Barbican itself.

The rig was a 96 camera circle, 8 metres across, shot in Salford. Where a standard bullet time shot fires every camera at the same instant, this one used our programmable sequential trigger system, with the cameras firing milliseconds apart and quirks and glitches programmed in deliberately as part of the artistic language.

We produced over 400 movies across the shoot, each aligned and delivered as ProRes, with previews on screen seconds after each trigger. The sound was made by Jo Wills with Sophie, built entirely from audio recorded during the shoot.

The finished piece ran at the Barbican through spring 2017 and was seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors.

More From The Set

More from the build and the shoot. Click any image for a closer look.