The frame speed of the Phantom camera creates the unique
slow-motion of Bryan's videos. For action sports, he typically works at
800-1000 frames per second. If he pushes the frame speed any higher, the
motion is brought nearly to a standstill. Speeds in the 1500 fps range
can capture ice dropping into a glass or milk splashing over cereal.
"When you shoot the slow motion stuff, the camera is clicking off 1000
or 1500 images every second," he says. "You're pretty much freezing the
moment."
When that massive stack of frames is played back, the
action gets slowed down to reveal each integral part of the movement.
"Like the surf roll you saw, every shot in there is three seconds real
time," Bryan says. Before Bryan uploads the video, he slims it down,
because the full file size for those three seconds is 16 gigabytes.
Bryan is meticulous about his equipment choices and set-up. He uses
Arri Ultra
lenses, which are widely used in Hollywood features. The lenses can
cost as much as $23,000 each, and Bryan uses "primes," which are lenses
that have a fixed focal length. When Bryan heads to a shoot, he may have
three or four separate ones in his bag. "I never use the zoom lenses,
myself, because they’re not as sharp, so I always use a fixed focal
length," he says.
Though he currently lives in Sydney, Bryan
grew up in western Australia near Margaret River, a surf hotspot, and
was influenced by the films of Jack McCoy. "He was a level ahead of
everyone else," Bryan says. Watching McCoy's videos over and over, Bryan
studied his technique and dreamed of capturing similar images one
day. "I'd come home from school, and straightaway I’d put in
Bunyip Dreaming or
Sons of Fun,"
he says. "McCoy's picture quality, the way he positioned himself in the
water — to me, he was just a complete idol." Bryan is quickly catching
up with his childhood idol. Because of his stature in the filmmaking
world, he typically receives the latest cameras before they are
officially released. He works with fabricators who build custom,
aluminum water-proof housings for each new camera.
A
surf photographer's worst nightmare is flooding a water housing, which
spells doom for the expensive camera inside. Bryan says he's never yet
flooded a housing. ("Touch wood!") He's made sure all of his cameras are
insured. "The whole package together — you’re putting close to $300,000
in the water," he says.
Thanks to the tech, Bryan can create his
signature slow-motion videos and shoot feature-film-quality images from
the water anywhere in the world. Recently, he put his equipment to the
test doing water video work for the upcoming
Point Break 2. Bryan can't share too many details from the shoot, but he calls it an intense experience. The locations for
Point Break 2
included Maui's famous big-wave spot, Jaws, and the shallow mutant reef
break at Teahupo'o in Tahiti. "For me, it was some of the craziest surf
scenes I've ever seen, because the waves were so big and heavy and the
director, Philip Boston, had some pretty amazing ideas," Bryan says. For
some of the sequences, two or even three surfers towed into the barrels
at Jaws or Teahupo'o at the same time. One day last winter, Bryan
filmed from the water at Jaws in 50-foot surf for the film.
The
Point Break 2
crew also used Red cameras to capture point-of-view images from inside
the barrel at Teahupo'o. The surfer deepest in the barrel held a
30-pound Red camera in a water housing and recorded images of the
surfers ahead of him. For the surfers, it was an incredibly high-risk
endeavor, because the surfer with the camera was deep in the barrel at
the most critical section of the wave.
"There were situations
where the surfer in the back with the camera would get blown off by the
shock wave [from the wave breaking], and I’d see the camera go flying
through the air," Bryan says. "That whole set-up, with the housing and
lens and everything, that’s $100,000, and to be seeing these things
getting thrown through the air in 20-foot waves — like, oh shit,
hopefully we’ll find it again. It was pretty wild."
Bryan is
constantly in demand. When we reached him by phone in Australia, he was
busy packing for a trip to Vanuatu, a remote island in the Pacific.
He was scheduled to shoot a diving scene set in a shipwreck for a
feature film. "I don’t even know what movie it is," he says, laughing.
