VO: We're going to find out how ordinary digital stills cameras can be used to create some extraordinary special effects.
JONNY PHILLIPS: Have you ever wondered how in some action in Kung Fu films the actors suddenly become frozen in time as the camera spins round them and they apparently hang in mid-air? Well in the business, this effect is generally called time slice, and this is how it's done.
RICHARD AMBROSE: Hey Jonny did you know I'm a highly trained Ninja black belt?
JONNY PHILLIPS: Let's have a look at that again. The easy bit is freezing the action, now that's just a case of repeating the same frame over and over again. The really tricky bit is moving the camera three meters in the blink of an eye and then picking up the action from the other side of the room.
VO: Now how on earth do they do that?
RICHARD AMBROSE: The answer is you don't use a single camera, but multiple cameras. At the point where the action freezes the shot is picked up by a whole bank of digital stills cameras. Here we've got 13 all angled slightly differently and it's this that allows us to look around that frozen moment in time.
VOICE OFF-CAMERCA: 3, 2, 1 Action!
VO: So here it is once more from a slightly different angle. As Richard hits his mark, all thirteen cameras are fired simultaneously capturing him in mid-flight. Next, the thirteen frames are joined together, but the movement is jerky as there aren't enough of them. To create fluid motion, a very powerful piece of movie software makes up more frames to go between the original frames. In fact the thirteen grow to over 200.
VO: Now you know how it's done, look out for these shots in movies, and don't worry, no scientists were hurt in the making of our movie.
