You had to make a camera look like it's traveling at 300 mph, but you couldn't make it actually travel at 300 mph so you had to slow everything down and build devices to do that. So you were constantly engineering.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We had the guys from X Men 2 do the cameras. They had a 360 camera that would go from one car, up in the air and over to another car in a continuous shot while the film was still rolling, going 90 mph.
I would have thought technology would have made it harder to do what I did.
I went around the corner to motion pictures.
George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that.
With high-speed cameras, we can do the opposite of time lapse. We can shoot images that are thousands of times faster than our vision. And we can see how nature's ingenious devices work, and perhaps we can even imitate them.
But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.
Richard Leacock and I ran into a guy who knew how to carve up a camera, and we had him carve one up for us. We had him chop it down and change the gears from metal to plastic, which would cut down on the sound it made when it was running.
My mom had gotten a Super 8 camera to make home movies with, and my brother and me got our hands on it and ran with it.
With this film, 'Need For Speed,' with this, we had a blank canvas to work with. What we had to do was have fast cars, and that's it.
You can't name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.