Rocket Bonfire Bullet Time Experiment - Smarter Every Day 65

Okay so Wayne asked me if he could have a fire at my house,
and I said yes, and then he shows up with like, a truck,
with speakers or subs or something, and then there's kids like chopping stuff up...
with an axe, and they're throwing stuff
in a fire. I don't know. I don't know.
And just move the camera to whatever I'm pointing out okay? Alright? Okay?
Hey it's me Destin welcome to Smarter Every Day. We're gonna talk about something called group sourcing.
[music]
Group sourcing is when you have a large group of easily influenced people...
Yeah, easily influenced people with cameras, and we're gonna
do a rocket on a rope, and the rocket on a rope is gonna fly down
and we're gonna have gasoline on the target and it's going to light the bonfire maybe.
It's either gonna do that, or we are going to look really stupid.
So what's gonna happen right now is all you have cell phones with cameras on them right?
Everybody turn to horizontal mode, horizontal mode. And then what I want you to do is
get in an arc around the fire on the back side.
And then what we're gonna do is something called bullet time.
What bullet time is, is you're gonna give me all your videos after the fact, and we're gonna
shoot the rocket and it's gonna blow up the fire, and then I'm gonna take
all your videos and stitch them together and it's gonna look like The Matrix.
Back up a little bit so you don't catch on fire, with your face.
- Dan the rocket will blast off. (Dan) Then what happens? - I don't know!
(Dan) You don't know? (Destin) If you're expecting an explosion I'm sorry it's not gonna happen.
This is gonna be kind of girly a little bit. It's a really old rocket so
they might not work.

[laughter]
[cheering] (Destin) So did you get it?
So now what we gotta do is figure out how to give me all of your video files.
So obviously the first challenge I had to overcome
is these videos did not kick on at the exact same time so I had to synchronize that by
looking at the fireball or listening to the audio and lining them up. The next thing I had to do
is I had to arrange them spatially as they were positioned around the bonfire.
Click on any of these videos and go to that person's perspective to see what their
reaction was to the fireball. Everybody with low resolution phones and
high resolution phones tended to group together. What does that tell us about the group?
Alright hold on, here we go.



That's awesome. Alright so here's what we did. We took this information
and we stitched it together to see what I could do with it. The first thing I decided to do
is to re-watch the video in real time but do it by scrolling through the different perspectives and
spin around the fire.









So after that I decided to try my hand
at bullet time.


So yeah I know, it looks pretty bad, but if you think about it we had 30 seconds of
instructions for a large group of amateur videographers who were able to accomplish
something pretty cool. What did we learn? First of all the radial distance from the object
that you're looking at is important. Pull a string and get everybody on the same distance.
Secondly the angular spacing. It'd be great if you could pace that off beforehand.
Third, it's important that you use the same devices all throughout because different devices react to brightness
levels and white balance differently. So if I'm honest this is the part of the video where I provide
links to other stuff on my channel in hopes that you'll check it out and subscribe. But, there's a cool unofficial
holiday in the UK set around bonfires at Periodic Videos. Feel free to check that out.
I'm Destin, thank you for watching. You're getting Smarter Every Day. Have a good one.


[ Captions by Andrew Jackson ] captionsbyandrew.wordpress.com
Captioning in different languages welcome. Please contact Destin if you can help.