Jamie Grover is having problems with her little sisters – all five of them. Such is the premise of Quints, a Disney Channel mow that recently wrapped in Toronto.

To lend the project a visual style in keeping with its quirky script, Canadian director Bill Corcoran, whose credits include the American series 21 Jump Street and MacGyver, devised a scene employing a technique known as a ‘bullet effect’ or an ‘array.’ Moviegoers will know it from The Matrix, which wowed audiences with these scenes that manipulate a single moment in time in three dimensions.

Michael Storey, the Toronto cinematographer who lensed Quints, describes it as ‘the viewer has the sense of circling an object frozen in time, [so] that you get a perspective change, and hence an illusion resembling a 3D effect.’

Feature and mow veteran Storey notes that Corcoran ‘was a bit concerned about all the things kids are watching these days – they have very picky eyes. They want to see something good, and they’ve seen it all. Bill and Stan Brooks [the executive producer from Once Upon a Time Films] felt that if we could give them a few extra things at very key moments in the film, it would help propel the [story] and lift it to another level.’

The fantasy sequence, shot at St. Basil’s Secondary School northwest of the city, begins with the teenage Jamie (Kimberly Brown) entering an auditorium followed by a marching band and carnival performers.

‘Bill’s idea was to use the action of circus performers for the story’s fantasy element and have the bullet effect freeze their movements,’ Storey says, explaining how the filmmakers tried to really ‘sell’ the effect. The scene incorporates a couple of fire-breathers, a clown flipping off a trampoline, twirlers throwing their batons, and balloons and streamers coming down – all to be captured in stop-action cinematography.

Quints’ bullet effect called for 120 identical Nikon still cameras with 28mm lenses to be arranged side-by-side in a 180-degree half circle around the room, each precisely framing a common target. (The camera configuration can be adapted to virtually any shape, and encompass up to 360 degrees.) The cameras are rigged through a computer system, which can trigger the shutter on each camera, either simultaneously, as in this case, or in a staggered order, depending on the desired effect.

Jamie first addresses the motion picture camera (one of two by Austrian manufacturer Moviecam used in the scene), and then, at a precise moment in her speech, the still cameras were fired off, thus suspending the circus performers in mid-air. It took six takes before the crew felt they had recorded a pictorially interesting moment.

Jamie then addresses the second Moviecam at the other end of the auditorium as she weaves through the frozen performers. This action was filmed with actor Brown walking in front of a moving green screen, while the plate of her surroundings was taken from the 120th image from the bullet-effect setup.

After shooting, the negative stocks from the still cameras and Moviecams – Kodak 5279 Vision 500T for both – were processed together. The photographs were then assembled in computer by post house toybox so that they ran together like motion picture film at 24 frames per second, creating the scene’s perspective shift by following the trajectory of the 120 cameras.

After toybox performed the image stabilization and color correction, special effects shop gvfx composited all the filmed components and put them in a form that could be run at 24 frames per second. The overall result should look like one apparently seamless camera move.

A costly effect

Storey estimates a bullet effect costs $80,000 to $120,000, including the rig, support equipment, personnel, film stock, and post-production. It might seem highly ambitious for a project that will ultimately be viewed on a television screen, but the dop points out that Disney is looking to showcase the medium’s latest visual capabilities.

‘Like most networks, Disney’s delivery now is not only just for the regular tv format, but also for high definition,’ he offers, ‘so they are prepared to, in whatever form, either distribute it or show it in hd.’ He calls the hd nature of the project Disney’s ‘main push on this.’

According to Storey, there are five bullet-effect rigs of this brand worldwide, and this was the debut of the first Toronto edition, owned by equipment distributor William F. White. [The production’s rental of the rig was facilitated by local service company Darius Films.] Whether the rig would make call time had Quints’ producers in a bit of a sweat.

‘It came down to the wire,’ Storey admits. ‘[wfw] said, ‘Yes, we’ll have it, but we’ve never worked with it yet.’ So basically we were the guinea pigs.’

It helped that the man who developed the rig, commercial director and cameraman Robert Latorre of Dallas-based Big Fish Films, came up to assist with the shoot. Latorre has appropriately named his invention ‘The Big Freeze.’

It was a long road from conception to realization of the sophisticated effect, with many contributors giving their all.

‘We really pushed hard,’ Storey says. ‘Bill pushed hard to get all the right elements, I pushed hard to make sure we were covered on the photographic side of it, and Stan pushed hard to sell it to Disney, who ultimately agreed.’

All that remains is for the creators to view the fruits of their labor.

Storey adds, ‘Bill is in Los Angeles cutting right now and he looked at a rough assembly of the scene. He sent me an e-mail and said it worked beautifully, which is great for all of us.’

disney.go.com/DisneyChannel/

www.bigfreeze.com

www.compt.com (Command Post/toybox)

www.gvfx.com

www.whites.com (William F. White)

www.dariusfilms.com