Freezing the action: Tim Macmillan continues to create amazing images and has some new tricks up his sleeve - Special Report: Technology - Brief Article

Post, June, 2002 by Ron Prince

BATH, ENGLAND -- We've all seen it. The action stops dead and the camera tracks around an object or actor suspended motionless in 3D space. Keanu Reeves did it with panache in The Matrix, and there are countless other examples involving everything from perfectly sliced potatoes to drops of water. Whilst a wide range of companies now practise frozen moments, Artist/photographer/ director Tim Macmillan can lay claim to having developed the technique and is still pushing the creative envelope.

Macmillan and his company Time-Slice Films (www.timeslicefilms.com), based in Bath, England, have delivered frozen moments for films, documentaries and music videos for the best part of a decade. This inventiveness has taken him and his cameras across the globe and into extreme environments. It has also led to collaborations with technology partners and some interesting spin offs.

IN THE BEGINNING

An artist by trade, Macmillan's epiphany came after stints at Bath Academy of Arts and The Slade in London in the early 1980s. "I was fascinated by how the Cubists used a 2D medium to explore 3D space," he says. "Although my training was in art, I became much more interested in using photographic techniques to explore time and space."

Initially, Macmillan began "messing about" with photograms and multiple exposures of objects using pinhole cameras. But studying figures like Eadweard Muybridge, the English photographer whose shots of a galloping horse in Animal Locomotion (1887), inspired Macmillan to develop a new way of capturing gestures, actions and expressions.

It wasn't long before he constructed his first "time-slice" (a term he has since trademarked) rig. Essentially this was an elongated, wooden pinhole camera, with a sandwich of 16mm reversal film, magnetic sound stock and a layer of Perspex inside to capture the images, and a simple flap for a shutter.

Although the results were crude, camera designs continued unabated. Soon he was shooting on 35mm with a more sturdily constructed camera, followed quickly by circular rig that could shoot 301 frames of an object placed at its centre. Early experiments included 360-degree moves around a dog, bathers in a swimming pool and buckets of cascading water -- all frozen in time.

Macmillan says there were two innovations back then that helped bridge crucial technological gaps: "the availability of high-quality plastic lenses, which Kodak made freely available in copious amounts, and the advent of T-Grain 500 ASA film stock that helped with issues like depth of field." These two advances enabled him to build bigger. more accurate cameras capable of capturing up to 125 broadcast-quality frames.

Work on experimental films funded by Arts Council grants continued for several years, with Macmillan trying to interest the commercial world in his new technique but to little avail. "It was too left field for the advertising at that time," he says.

Until, that was, on May 12, 1993, when he appeared on the BBC's primetime science programme, Tomorrow's World. It was the first public broadcast of the effect, and while the BBC switchboard was jammed with calls from viewers anxious about the health of the frozen dog, Macmillan's own phone soon began ringing with interest from TV and filmmakers.

After working on a series of natural history documentaries for the BBC during 1995, Macmillan shot his first major advertising project, London Static, an ad for Capital Radio posted by Smoke & Mirrors. Hectic years followed, with work on movie projects like Wing Commander for Digital Anvil, Hallmark's Merlin, BBC's Supernatural and numerous spots and music promos. US work included spots for Nintendo, Reebok and the Campaign far a Drug Free America.

SUSAN AND JOSEPHINE

In 1996, Macmillan reached the apogee of his camera rig building with Josephine. The camera -- and its I meter radius counterpart, Susan -- features high-quality Zeiss lenses for extra image clarity and gives a 5 meter, 90 degree circular tracking shot in any combination of time-slice live-action, long exposure or high-speed shutter mode.

Although Macmillan also has a small cache of 35mm Nikon SLRs to ply his time-slice trade, Josephine and Susan have achieved longevity in the business because they are portable, and therefore perfect for location work.

Macmillan has variously mounted them on to vehicles tracking cheetahs at 60mph in Africa, hanging off a boat following dolphins in the Caribbean and filming snowball fights in Alps at -20[degrees]C.

After a recent sabbatical, taking time to concentrate on his personal portfolio, Macmillan has been back in the saddle with a new BBC natural history series Weird Nature, pushing frozen moments to new levels with the introduction of multi-flash: multiple exposures on a single negative frame using flash guns that fire flashes of light in rapid succession.

He has just won another Arts Council grant for a new short film and is also a technology partner of Snell & Wilcox and The Foundry, pixel-bashing and providing critical feedback on new products destined to have implications in the fields of vectorised, 3D cinematography and live broadcast.