Rocket Bonfire Bullet Time Experiment - Smarter Every Day 65

Okay, so wine asked me if he could have a fire at my house, and I said yes. They showed up with 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. Just move the camera to whatever I’m pointing at.

Okay, okay, you ready? All right, ready? Yeah, hey, it’s me Destin. Welcome to Smarter Every Day! We’re gonna talk about something called group sourcing. Group sourcing is when you have a large group of easily influenced people. Yeah, it’s the influence people with cameras!

We’re going to do a rocket on a rope, and the rocket on the rope is going to fly down, and we’re going to put gasoline on the target, and it’s going to light the bonfire. Maybe. It’s either gonna do that or really, really stupid.

So what’s going to happen right now is all you have cell phones with cameras on them, right? Right? Time to horizontal mode! Horizontal mode! What you do is get it in an arc around the fire on the backside. What we’re going to do is something called bullet time.

What bullet time is, is you’re going to give me all your videos after the fact, and we’re going to shoot the rocket. It’s going to blow up the fire, and then I’ll take all your videos and stitch them together. It’s not like the Matrix!

So back up a little bit so you don’t catch on fire! Did your face? Damn! The rocket will blast off! Then what happens? I don’t know! You don’t know? If you’re expecting an explosion, I’m sorry. It’s not going to happen. This is going to be kind of, kind of girly. A little bit early old rocket, so they might not work.

Now we gotta figure out how to get all of your video files! So obviously, the first challenge I had to overcome was 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 was 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 the 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?

All right, hold on! Here we go! That’s awesome! All right, so here’s what we did. We took this information and stitched it together to see what I could do with it. The first thing I decided to do is rewatch 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! We 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 centered around bonfires at Periodic Videos! Feel free to check that out. I’m Destin. Thank you for watching. You get smarter every day! Have a good one!