Going Down in Flames

Don't try this at home...

Hello, axiiio VIPs!

As you know, we at axiiio have a history of trying crazy ideas.

But, sometimes, these ideas don't quite work. Our latest crazy idea was to take this photography technique and convert it to a motion shot.

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The plan was to shoot a clean plate of just the mannequin, shoot multiple takes of flames on either side of the mannequin, then shoot a motion timelapse of a starry night sky, and comp them all together.

We had some issues with our homemade flamethrower (do not try at home) but the axiiio setup worked perfectly! So we'd like to tell you about it.

So firstly we needed a long slider to get a good amount of parallax in our final shot. We accomplished this using an iFootage Shark Slider with extra rods on either side. This is one of the cool things about the axiiio nano system, it works with third-party equipment! Stay on the lookout for our own super-steady, infinitely-expandable slider that we'll be releasing as an add-on to the axiiio system in the future. ;)

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Once the slider was in place and secured at both ends with extra tripods, we loaded up our motion program (that we made in advance in the studio). The motion is relatively simple, a dolly with a slight pan to keep the mannequin centered. Once we're set up we can run the program as many times as we like for as many takes as we want, and because the axiiio system is frame-accurate, they'll all line up! The ProMoCo app makes it so that even our starry night timelapse background plate will line up with our regular motion shots.

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Here's a sneak peek of what we were TRYING to do. It wasn't as successful as we'd like, but we'll attempt another shoot in the future with a better flamethrower. We'll be posting some of the footage we got from this attempt onto our socials so subscribe to those if you haven't yet.

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Thanks

That's all for this one. Stay creative and make sure to get in touch if you have any questions, want more details, want to discuss your motion projects, or anything – just email equiries@axiiio.com.

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