When Monster Energy required a high-impact film to introduce Monster Zero Sugar in Europe, they entrusted Crucial FX to provide a comprehensive solution for the project. Notably, this involved the use of cinema cameras and high-powered lasers to produce spectacular visual effects.
The project called for a specific aesthetic, mirroring a film produced in the US, which utilised lasers to exploit the ‘rolling shutter’ effect. This created incredible aerial visuals as if the lasers were frozen in time. So, what exactly is the rolling shutter effect? It’s a result of how cameras capture film footage. For this project, we used an Arri Alexa camera, a high-end digital cinema camera designed to capture cinema-quality images under various lighting conditions. This allowed our footage to maintain a professional, theatrical look, even with low light levels, which was ideal for this project.
The camera captures video at 60 frames per second, but not every part of the frame is recorded at the exact same moment. The image is captured line by line, starting from the top and progressively scanning to the bottom. This creates a time difference between when the top part of the image is captured and when the bottom is captured, resulting in unique effects, especially when filming fast-moving objects.
This image illustrates how helicopter blades appear bent and distorted due to the rolling shutter effect. Altering the camera’s frame rate or shutter angle can either amplify or diminish this effect as needed.
This video from Kenneth Lu effectively demonstrates this concept:
Back to lasers… A high-speed laser projecting a pattern is also moving, even when it looks static. A circular projection is created by scanning a single laser beam rapidly using galvo motors. Combining lasers and rolling shutter results in some truly fascinating effects. Even simply turning on a laser and filming standard looks can produce some weird and wonderful effects. By synchronising the laser scanning speed and shape parameters with the camera, we could create the impressive mid-air effects that we desired. The outcome was fantastic – it looked as though we had frozen the laser mid-air to create a vortex around the athlete. Check out our video of the shoot below:
This video by Tom Scott demonstrates other possible effects and provides a clear explanation of the phenomena:
Crucial FX assembled a fantastic team to deliver this project under tight deadlines. The lasers used in this project were 35w RGB lasers, supplied by our friends at BPM SFX. Under their expert control, we created some amazing mid-air effects. The video was directed by Lorna Jones, our Creative Director, and the Director of Photography was the fantastic Paul Mortlock. The video was then edited and graded by our specialist in-house team.
Crucial FX provided the complete technical design solution, including venue hire, lighting and video screens. We specialise in custom, highly technical creative projects – contact us here to start bringing your next project to life.
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