Breaking Gravity: GoPro Array Captures Break Dancers in Bullet Time

Photography Tips

Ever wonder what break dancing looks like in bullet time? Check out this video by PermaGrinFilms, showing the break dancers, gymnasts, and parkour athletes of the San Diego United Training Center strutting their stuff:

Bullet time, also known as time slicing, is a photographic effect that produces an extreme transformation of time and space. Using this technique, time can be slowed down to the point of seeing such things as flying bullets (hence the name via Warner Brothers) and the object being filmed can be seen from any angle.

Creating a video that uses bullet time can be extremely challenging (or at the very least exhausting), but successfully using GoPros for bullet time is particularly troublesome, because you can’t genlock them. Genlock creates the synchronization necessary for great bullet time editing. (For a couple of dollars more, GoPro could add a chip to their cameras that enabled genlock, but there’s not enough demand for that kind of specialization.)

Given the challenges, the editing in this short film was excellent—particularly some of the break dancing scenes.

What do you think? Should GoPro add a camera with a specialized chip to its line just for those who want to create bullet time videos?