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It’s no secret that a lot of time, money, and effort goes into photographing and filming all that delicious food you see in advertisements. Mashed potatoes in place of ice cream, carefully arranged ingredients on subs, and perfectly golden french fries are all things you’ve seen so often that they’re taken for granted. But, those are static shots – the food is almost always just sitting on a plate. At most, you might see a chef turning a steak or searing a fillet in a commercial for a restaurant. What takes real skill – both artistic and technical – is assembling a hamburger in mid-air and getting it all in stunning 4k video.
That’s what [Steve Giralt] set out to do, and to accomplish it he had to get creative. Each component of the hamburger was suspended by rubber bands, and an Arduino timed and controlled servo system cut each rubber band just before that ingredient entered the frame. There’s even a 3D printed dual-catapult system to fling the condiments, causing them to collide in the perfect place to land in place on the burger.
In order to get this shot, [Steve] needed two things: precise timing and a robotic camera system to follow the burger down as it was assembled as it fell. The timing was taken care of with a control system he designed himself (which he’ll reuse for future projects). The robotic camera was a commercial unit capable of repeatedly following a preprogrammed path. You can see in the video below how it rotates around the hamburger to achieve a really cool 3D effect. Obviously a camera-wielding robot like the one [Steve] used is very expensive, but with a little ingenuity a DIY build is certainly possible.
[thanks to DMPalmer for the tip]
Filed under: Arduino Hacks, digital cameras hacks
