For the launch of Honda’s Aquatrax F-15X at the company’s dealer convention, Robb Hart and Martin Brinkerhoff were charged with conceiving and co-directing a two-minute piece that would be projected on multiple large screens to show off the thrill and excitement of the craft. And then they found out that the actual craft would not be available for the shoot.

So they developed the idea of shooting dancers in water to convey the emotion of the craft. The eventual display included five, 30-foot HD screens running simultaneously, accompanied by laser lights and fog. Martin Brinkerhoff and Associates of Irvine produced the spectacular show. Hart and Sharon Diaz of the boutique Orange County house an ideal world handled all the post work.

Click below to watch the Center Screen of the installation.

How did you develop the concept for this?
It started off quite different. We were going to shoot the actual craft. And then it turned out the prototype of the craft wasn’t available so I suggested we show speed and the experience of a watercraft through lyrical and suggestive motif of water in slow motion to represent the thrill and excitement of it.

How did you determine the shooting technique?
I researched what was out there in term of high speed cameras and the Phantom looked fascinating. The idea of shooting 1920×1080 up to 1000 frames-per-second was perfect for what I needed.

Looking at all the material there were two things I wanted to add to the mix. One was a moving camera with the slow mo. The other was a core solution to the light problem. When you are shooting that fast you need bucket-loads of light. I did not want to get into a situation where I lost the beauty of backlit water. So we used a soft sun ‘ a 50K light ‘ and it was magical.

Mounting the Phantom on the (Milo) motion control rig, which was able to move at six feet-per-second, I was able to get some pretty unusual results. The camera, within a 12-second shot, moved about 90 feet in an arc around the pool. The effect of that was interesting because it took it away from just being a simple locked off, ‘Oh gee, isn’t slow motion cool,” to more of a production camera type view. It felt like a shoot I would do shooting normal speed, the only difference was we shot at 1000 fps, some it we shot at 480fps. I wanted to be able to get enough done in one take and I felt that 480 was fast enough for some the stuff I was doing.

The Milo long arm motion control was very effective and reliable. Tim Donlevy, the mocap operator, has a wealth of experience. He did a lot of the motion control work on King Kong. He ran the rig with Chris Toth assisting him. I’ve used a lot of motion control before. Using an 18-foot arm at the speeds we needed for this job was a lot of fun.

Any other production techniques that you had to employ particular to making the slow motion footage have the look you wanted?
The trickiest bit was persuading the choreographer that he had to completely abandon his usual method of choreography. I needed a routine that was designed to happen within 12 seconds. So to watch it on set it was so bizarre. I’d shout ‘Action,’ the camera would whip across the stage like a bullet, rain was pouring from every which way, fire hoses pointing at the dancers who were dancing this frantic dance amongst it all.

And did you dump off the RAW files from the Flash drive on the Phantom?
No. The Phantom records onto onboard Flash memory. So you have two options for playback: Either take the RAW files and dump them off, but that is over 10 minutes of download time, or you can use the HDSDI out so you can take that signal out to an HDCAM tape as you play it back.
I had been warned by Vision Research and the rental house that some people had been frustrated waiting for the data files to download. If you take the data files you got 10-15 minutes of downloading time. So if you are happy enough to take the 4:2:2 1080 signal the workflow was absolutely flawless. I heard some people had tried to take it to an HDCAM SR, which is a bit silly because that’s a 4:4:4 recording format. So it seemed by staying 4:2:2 there was no problem at all in any of our takes, which made it very flexible on set. It just gave us a chance to review each shot. What could be shot in 12 seconds would take a couple minutes to playback. That wasn’t a couple minutes of waiting around that was just the time it took to watch it. Everyone was so fascinated by watching it. It was one of those shoots where there wasn’t really any downtime. The time we spent watching the playback gave us ideas for what we were going to do in the next take. All in all it was one of those wonderful experiences where it all worked smoothly.

Explain the post process?
It was fairly straightforward. We took the HDCAM tapes, loaded them into Final Cut Pro. Doing the time warps, ramping speeds up and down in Final Cut turned out to be flawless, almost easier than we expected. Whatever speed we shot at to whatever speed we wanted in post we got superb results.

It was a little unusual in that our company is a visual effects company. I am a director by trade but one that did his own effects so I ended up having an effects house to do the shots. Usually we are very effects-intensive. On this particular job it was really straight editing. We did a tiny bit of cleanup but most it was all was caught in camera.

This project was displayed on five screens, how did you approach editing the various clips so they would all work together?

Five HD projection screens, each one 30-feet across so it was super-impressive. The five screens butted together in a 3:2 matrix. The center screen was where the final reveal came. It was designed to work in a sort of arch.

It was a nice challenge to learn how to choreograph the material to work using the five screens. I shot it with that in mind so the material would work across five screens displayed simultaneously. My technique for that is I start in the middle. I have sketches of what I want for all the screens but usually I just start with the middle. I work with Sharon. We were literally swapping places. I would be editing one part, she’d be doing another, and then we’d swap. So it was a true collaboration.

Every day we would post H.264 QuickTimes of the multi-screen to the client on an ftp site. Today most jobs now involve remote posting of materials for review and collaboration. It’s very effective. HD footage across the net. It might take 20 minutes for a 2 second shot but that’s a lot better than going out to Fed Ex.