Cheap Toy Cameras Make Bullet Time Shots Affordable

The Matrix is known for many, many things and did more to change modern cinema than just about any other film in history. One of its biggest contributions to cinematography was the “bullet time” effect, in which the camera seems to orbit around the subject as they stay frozen in place. That’s easy enough to achieve if everything is CGI, but how do you freeze action like that in the real world? The answer is to use a bunch of cameras, which puts this effect out of reach of most creators. But 3DSage found some cheap toy cameras on Amazon that make bullet time shots affordable.

John Gaeta created the iconic bullet time effect in The Matrix by utilizing several still cameras, all triggered at the same time. Each captures a slightly different angle and the video we see is the result of showing those in sequence, with interpolated frames in-between to smooth things out. A big movie studio can easily afford to rent (or even purchase) a whole pallet of prosumer still cameras for this job, but few others can. So 3DSage found the cheapest possible way to get the same result — albeit a lower-quality one.

The cameras make up most of the cost, so 3DSage hunted down the most affordable model he could find. That is the Suziyo Kids Camera on Amazon, which costs just $9.99. Yes, that is the real price for an actual working digital camera and it even includes a 32GB SD card. The specs are mostly lies and would be pretty bad even if they were accurate, but the price is amazing. We have to assume that some manufacturer or distributor is cutting their losses on these things, rather than making a profit.

3DSage bought 10 of these cameras and mounted them onto a 3D-printed rig. That framework keeps the cameras spaced evenly and pointing in the appropriate direction (towards the subject in the center). The original plan was to use some custom electronics to trigger the camera shutter buttons simultaneously, but 3DSage found that a frame from the video seems to be higher quality than an actual still image. So he abandoned the shutter system and simply set all of the cameras to record video.

From there, he gathered one frame from each camera’s video clip (all from the same moment), performed some light editing to reduce noise, and then popped those into Flowframes Video Interpolator software. That generates new frames to fill in the gaps between the actual images.

The result is pretty entertaining. This ultra-cheap bullet time definitely doesn’t look as good as what we all drooled over in The Matrix, but it does work and only cost $99.90, plus tax and 3D printer filament.