In this weeks Dan’s Friday Film-Making Creative Tips & Wonders post, we take a look at an innovative technique by American filmmaker Pavel Krikunov called ‘Bullet Time’, we turn back the clock to 1997 to look at the Robert Zemeckis classic SciFi movie ‘Contact’ and delve deeper into some of Adobe Premiere Pro’s new AI features in its latest update!

Bullet Time

An interesting technique called ‘Bullet Time’ created by Pavel Krikunov an American film-maker based in New York. This technique involves keeping the subject in the middle of the frame and creating arcing movements with the camera in one direction. Speed ramping and stabilisation are added in the edit to creative a very effective technique which I think the results speak for itself.

Click to view Bullet Time example

This technique could be used in trendy fashion adverts, promo videos and social media posts to grab viewers’ attention and create a statement. Luckily for us, Pavel Krikunov shared a tutorial on how to achieve his technique.

Bullet Time Tutorial

‘Contact’ by Robert Zemeckis

The movie ‘Contact’ directed by Robert Zemeckis is a decent film that contains one of the best pieces of film-making I have ever seen! I still to this day have no idea how they did it… I think it may have been the use of green screen and mirrors? Regardless of how they did it, it’s an amazing piece of cinematography and editing. Cinematographer Don Burgess gives us a break down on how he achieved the shot however I am still left scratching my head! A real artist at work!

Audio Tagging in Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro lets you label audio files as either dialogue, music, sfx & ambience. It also has an auto-tag feature where it can decipher what the audio is. This labeling of tracks is mega useful as Adobe can interpret it better. For example, with dialogue it can enhance the speech and if there is also a music track on the timeline, it can auto-duck using keyframes so the music doesn’t overpower the dialogue without you having to do it manually.