**The Other Guys** found its way onto Netflix again recently and I rewatched it for the nth time. When Allen goes “drinking with Terry Hoitz”, [this scene catalogues their experience](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l80mHMmJzr0). I’ve seen this technique before but I can’t figure out how its accomplished. ELI5?
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Dozens of stills cameras that each take a photo from a slightly different angle. Then they combine the photos like a flip book to create the effect.
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The actors are SURROUNDED by a ring of still cameras next to ea other-forming the ring. A picture is taken w/ea camera-ALL the cameras clicking once and at the exact same time.
A movie is a series of still images taken over time.
That camera might also be moving, such as on a car, or rail, or boom, so you have a series of still images taken over time and space…
You could imagine if you could move the camera fast enough, you could freeze time… almost.
Instead of moving one camera, setup 2, or 3, or 50 cameras along the path and then splice frames that were taken at the same instant (or in rapid succession)
Now a days, things have gotten so smart, you can use algorithm to fill in large gaps between cameras. NFL uses this technology to pan around the stadium despite not having cameras at every angle around the perimeter. They do it in near real time, if you have some post processing time, you can make it nearly perfect without needing a multimillion dollar camera array.
One of two ways-either the actors freeze in place while the camera spins around them or a giant ring of still cameras (30+) take a 360 degree photo. The photo is then manipulated digitally to make it look like you are flying around the center of the picture with the camera.
I remember seeing a making-of for that scene in particular. Apparently they didn’t use the original bullet time technique of multiple still cameras. They had one camera on rails that passed through the set multiple times, a bunch of people standing as still as possible, and then a ton of CGI effects to remove the rails and add in the beer splashes, gunshots, flying money, etc. They also used digital compositing to blend together the multiple scenarios, and in some cases they used 3D models to replace actors who couldn’t hold their poses stably enough.
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The matrix pioneered this method. They called it “bullet time” and it uses a ton of cameras to achieve the effect. However, the movie you reference is actually not bullet time, as some comments here suggest. Most of it is actually just pure CGI. The entire shot was a single camera on rails, the cast literally just had to hold their poses for a long enough time. There’s a youtube video on the bts: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_xGkwa6Qtw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_xGkwa6Qtw)
And here’s a quote they made to mtv ([http://www.mtv.com/news/1645370/the-other-guys-five-secrets-revealed/](http://www.mtv.com/news/1645370/the-other-guys-five-secrets-revealed/))
>We just wrote joke scenarios of a night gone horribly wrong. We went to this bar on the Upper West Side [of Manhattan] and shot it in half a day. We cast stuntmen and women who could hold poses. Our special effects company, Evil Eye, added all these funny elements.
Using multiple cameras to capture stop motion goes all the way back to 1878.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-19th-century-photographer-first-gif-galloping-horse-180970990/
Just one camera, actors could be projected as single frames on bunch of planes, everything else is cg. Nothing else. Its actually not that hard. In case of camera rotation actors could be either cg characters, or just really still standing people. No bullet time or anything like that.
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