HyperZoom™ing through Hallstatt gets a Staff Pick on Vimeo, 120+K views in the first four days and has been published in on-line magazines all over the world.
You can see just a few of the recent links on my ‘What the Press Say‘ page on this site.
This technique took me the last year or so to perfect.
Although I had developed the basic idea at least ten years ago, I never really had the time to invest in perfecting it until recently. The result has been everything I could have hoped for.
The technique enables the camera to seemingly fly across huge distances and from one location to another without cuts – even though those locations are not always adjacent to each other.
This means a complete journey through a location can be designed as a single continuous shot. All achieved in full high resolution, in realtime or timelapse, with no need for a drone.
Flight routes and speed can be altered in post production. Three dimensional motion displacement is also possible as can be seen during the reverse flight over the castle in this short example from Sesimbra in Portugal.
People constantly ask me how this is possible. All I can say is that it takes a lot of advance planning to choreograph the sequence of moves and envisage where the camera will fly. The shooting phase must be completed as quickly as possible to avoid too much change in lighting conditions and utilizes a specialized rig built solely for HyperZoom™. Post production in After Effects is a multi-resolutional four dimensional jigsaw puzzle and takes a long time to perfect.
With regards to how long it took to produce this piece. I spent a few days scouting out locations and working out the flight path I wanted the camera to take as well as gaining permissions for the interior shots etc. Then the shoot itself was mainly done in one day with a few remaining bits completed the next day. Post production took a long time – difficult to say how many hours as I was simultaneously working on other jobs on other computers, but I’m guessing a good couple of weeks or more solid post production. Then of course there was co-ordinating the music and sound design with Slava. I think as I do more of these type of productions I will become more efficient at handling the post production. However knowing me I’m sure I’ll find ways to make it even harder as the technique develops.