The Slow Mo Guys Answer Slow Motion Questions From Twitter

Hello, I'm Gavin.

I'm Dan.

We're the Slow-Mo Guys

and today we're doing Slow-Mo Support.

(upbeat music)

Ryan, Texas-Red141, asks, what's your favorite video

that you recorded for Slow Mo Guys?

I certainly like the ones where

you do something ridiculous

like erupting from a six foot balloon of water.

Or jumping into 1,000 mouse traps.

There's one where we did like a competition.

We basically tried to get into these giant balloons

and do like a competition to have the best pose.

I, honestly, is one of the funniest videos

I think we've done.

Dan got into the balloon and all the air leaked out.

So it's just literally, I was just trapped in the balloon,

just completely trapped.

You could have just left me

and I wouldn't have been able to get out.

It's one of the few times

I literally rolled on the floor laughing.

I was there.

Almost suffocating.

Like I just had this little hole to breathe through.

I was like give me more air!

Yeah you were yelling at me

because I wasn't putting the leaf blower in for more air,

but I was just too busy laughing.

Yeah, you were just on the floor.

Not helping.

And that bit, nothing to do with the slow-mo

It was just us getting ready.

No, I mean the slow-mo was alright.

[Gavin] But the slow-mo was...

Nyeh.

I think for the Super Slow Show, my favorite was

probably the det cord because I always wanted

to film that in slow-mo.

Always wanted to, but massive shock wave.

Not easy to get hold of detonating cord.

I would say outside of the Super Slow Show,

I like the one where we put powder paint in all the airbags.

I think in the video, I said it was as if the Muppets

called in an airstrike.

Yes.

It was that colorful.

Radd.it asks what are the best slow motion scenes

of all time?

I like the entirety of Inception.

Oh, I thought you were going to say

the movie that you filmed.

Oh

Because that was best...

Sherlock Holmes 2 because I worked on it.

I should've said that.

I thought you would've said that.

I was like no, ignore him

There were some cool ones in Dread.

I liked the drug that was in it,

the whole point of it was around slow motion

so it was some awesome scenes there.

I worked on that one too.

Did you really?

Yeah.

No you didn't, did you really?

I actually hated Dread, it was terrible.

No, dammit, can we cut that one out?

Lizabeth Zehner asks why is everyone so obsessed with

filming things in slow motion lately

or starting in regular speed then slow motion then regular?

That's called annoying?

Hastag annoying.

Because it looks wicked!

What's wrong with you, Lizabeth?

Everything looks cooler in slow-mo

Yeah!

[Gavin] Except for snails

I'm offended by that.

Like paint drying.

Hashtag annoying.

Think we're done with that question.

Tony Churnside asks what about sound? Do you always

just use the sound slowed down, or do you mix/sound design?

I would say the sound design is by far

the most time consuming part of making these videos.

What I'll do is I'll sometimes slow the sound down

as much as I can, say if there was

something landing on the ground and you need that sound out,

I'll just re-time that so that fits.

And then I'll just add in other sound effects

and I put in that sort of background hum

to hide empty spaces where there's no sound.

I remember one time, a very early video,

we had a lighter on a barbecue in your garden in England

and we sort of just set it on fire and it blew up

and the lighter spun hundreds of times.

And I remember you telling me that all you did was

(makes whoosh noise with mouth)

I think I went (blows raspberry) and I slowed it down

and it was like (slow whoosh noise)

So sometimes it's just my mouth.

So it's like completely made up, essentially.

So but the thing is now, unless people watch this,

they'll think that that's the noise that things make.

They don't know it's actually your mouth.

Tails, @heyimtails, asks where do you guys get the tons

of food for the Super Slow Show?

Is it donated or old food?

Asking for a friend the friend is me.

Haha, I like Tails.

We just used to go the craft services table

and all the stuff that was about to be chucked away,

we'd just take it,

and sometimes none of the crew had any food left to eat.

Then they'd come to lunch time

and there'd be no watermelons.

Yeah, but a lot of the time we tried to catch the food,

after it exploded or something.

I've often eaten food post explosion, as well.

I would say you've eaten more exploded food

than most humans.

I actually think that might be true.

I think I must've eaten more blown up food than anyone else.

So refreshing.

Clueless Will, yep, asks what is the worst experience

filming for a video?

Well, I think that's a me question because Gavin,

all he does is stand behind the camera

and watch me do the bad stuff.

According to Dan, all I do is press the button.

He just does this, and then that.

And then I have to like do all the work.

But I'd say, I've done so many things

like jumping into a thousand mousetraps on a trampoline.

On the Super Slow Show, I tried to impress Tony Hawk

and I broke my wrist.

And I did a belly flop from about 12 foot high up

and I've been burnt.

I've had my ears torn, quite a lot of painful things

have happened to me.

Or unpleasant like puking milk up.

I've stubbed my toe once.

As bad as all that stuff is, it's great content.

I would say the worst experience is

when we go through this massive, long set up,

or you go through something like that,

and the footage doesn't look any good.

Cause then we get crabby.

Sandeep Suresh says what's your process like

when you're trying to create a new idea for a video?

Because we live in separate countries,

we only shoot like three times a year

so when we're not shooting, we're slowly building this list.

Maybe it's stuff the viewers have sent to us,

maybe it's something we've seen on Reddit.

Or I'll just be in the shower and have an idea or something.

And then when we finally get together,

we'll have this massive list

and we'll then decide which ones we wanna do

in that filming session.

And then we'll go shopping for props.

Yeah, I'll go and buy some water balloons, paint, and...

melons, and drills.

One of the big selling points for us for the Super Slow Show

was that we were able to do stuff

we've never been able to do before,

and we were also able to revisit stuff

and scale it up, massively.

The episode of such called Double It,

where we were doubling up on our previous experiments.

And one of my favorite ones was the paint drill.

I mean, we first used a normal drill and then I thought

what we're actually after is the spinning paint,

we don't necessarily need to store paint on a drill bit

because you can't really hold that much.

So we I came up with the idea to have a PVC pipe

separate into four different chambers with slits cut into it

and we would just fill it with paint,

and then just use a drill to power that to spin

and it looked insane.

And then there were some things

we just physically couldn't fit in the garden.

There's a video with Andy Bell coming up,

where he rides a motorbike across a pool.

First of all, we don't have a pool

[Together] Or a bike

Oh, and we don't have any skills.

So that's kind of impossible, but we would love

to have seen that so we did so that was pretty sweet.

Another thing I wanted to do with the Super Slow Show

was different camera techniques.

Stuff that we've never been able to do before

and that involved mounting the camera on moving objects

like Andy Bell's head or spinning it on a spinning rig

looking inwards to create a sort of bullet time effect.

There's a special robotic arm that we've had the chance

to use before where essentially it holds the camera

and swings 'round really quickly.

But we had an entirely rigged that was just huge

and we could put much bigger subjects,

like a bear trap with a soda bottle in the middle of it.

Cause a lot of the time, when you've got one camera

or two cameras, you're locked into those angles

and there might be interesting stuff happening on the back

or the other side.

Honestly, I wish we could've spun it faster,

but it got to the point where,

because the camera's so heavy,

if we cranked it up all the way, the arm bent

and all the cables snapped.

We were on the brink,

we were pushing that thing right to the edge.

We were.

Bald Guy says, oh, Andy Williams,

is this the best slow motion explosion ever? he asks.

Orggg, first of all.

One of my favorite videos.

It is brilliant because we have these bangers in the UK

and they're way more powerful

than the bangers you'd get here.

It's like a MA8 times 10.

Yeah, but we put it in a watermelon

and were sort of expecting it to

just sort of go puh and it exploded perfectly,

so that it looked like a planet that

was just perfectly just being annihilated.

We rarely test stuff not on camera,

at that point, we might as well just go for it anyways,

might as well just film it and present it as an episode.

We should've tested that,

because any less and it would've just split the melon.

Any more powerful, it would've misted the melon.

But it perfectly fragmented.

Unfortunately, a lot of it went into your face.

(watermelon splash)

Orggggg

Kristin Goppel asks weekends at our house sometimes

involves building small scale models

and filming their destruction in slow motion.

Future engineers or filmmakers or both?

I used to love doing stuff like that.

Haha, I like that people spend their weekends doing this.

It's good.

That's such a cool project.

I wish I had that kind of technology when I was a kid.

Mark Hillary asks filming an electrical storm with

my iPhone in slow motion mode and I can see lightning

in front of me and where I'm pointing the phone on a tripod,

yet the recording has nothing.

Is it too fast for the phone to record

or something about slow-mo?

Lightning is very very fast, the speed of light,

well it's the fastest thing, in't?

But yeah, you can absolutely miss a lightning strike

or because of rolling shutter,

you might get sort of one half of the image

very bright and blown out and the other half

hasn't happened yet sorta thing.

You can record it with much higher frame rates though,

maybe, you know, towards 50,000.

The actual strike comes up from the earth,

so from the clouds,

you get a bunch of tiny thin lightning bolts.

Tendrils. That's the word, yeah.

Yeah, the first one that hits the ground

then sends the big lightning strike back up.

It's insane to watch in slow-mo.

I mean, one day maybe they'll have phones

that do 50,000 frames per second.

Yeah, maybe when we're old men.

CLH, or Chris_LH1987, oh I was born the year after that.

Fun fact.

Gavin Free, can slow motion video be live streamed

in a situation where the camera will knowingly be destroyed

by whatever it's filming?

All the cameras we use record internally to RAM,

so if we used any of our cameras,

you'd probably gonna hit your footage and destroy it all.

Plus the cameras are expensive,

so we don't really want to trash them.

One of the Phantom V Series cameras,

there's like a central head and then cameras come out of it,

just the heads of the cameras come out of it.

You can ruin the camera part and keep the data.

I mean, you can livestream the feed from the camera,

but you would then have to switch it to playback

to play back the slow-mo, you can't livestream every frame.

Daz Dylanger asks why do lights flicker when a video

is in slow motion?

That's due to the frequency of electricity.

So in the US, it's 60 hertz.

So your normal lights, like the ones in here,

are actually turning on and off 60 times every second,

which you can't see with your eyes

because the intervals when they're off is so brief.

When you're filming at thousands of frames a second,

they'll be pulsing.

Yeah, that's one of the biggest issues

when you're filming slow-mo indoors,

is that you need big lights.

You're talking like 5000 watts probably,

because at that size, when the lights are turning off,

they're so big and the filaments is so big

that there's not actually enough time for them

to cool enough to dim.

So you just need big, fat, really hot lights.

Looking very cool, Ken Gibson, with your beard

and your cigarette out the mouth.

Looking badass.

I'm sure you have tons of ideas for slow-mo guys,

but have you ever considered doing

a somewhat gross out series with things

like a popping pimple?

We did me bloking up some milk.

Yeah, we've done vomit, that was gross.

We tried filming a pimple but it didn't really explode

it just sort of like didn't really do anything.

I have a pretty sensitive gag reflex too.

And you don't want when you're filming to be like

That's all you do.

That's all I do.

Andy U Ferguson asks you ever thought of filming

a grenade going off underwater in slow motion?

Or shooting ballistics gel with different things?

A grenade?

(slow motion explosion sound)

We did that.

Wait, wait, do I have any grenades?

I don't have one.

You don't? I'm fresh out unfortunately.

It's very hard to get a hold of a frag grenade,

like a military grenade.

Yeah, it's also unnecessary.

All it is is you just need an explosion underwater

which we have filmed, with bangers on a much smaller scale.

Although, because it's slow motion,

it kind of looks bigger than it actually is.

We've never done ballistics gel.

We're trying to do too much stuff with live ammo.

It's scary.

He's scared.

TDTV asks what kind of lenses do you guys use?

The lenses we use depend on the camera,

the different cameras we use have different mounts.

So whenever we borrow the V2511, that has a Canon mount

so I whip out my Canon lenses.

I try and use primes because they're a lot faster lenses.

They can go more wide open and I sometimes need the light.

For our Phantom Flex 4k, we use PL lenses

which are, unfortunately,

much more expensive and much bigger

and we use primes again,

just because you can open them up more.

We've also used macro lenses,

I use that to film the pixels in my tv

and the hair follicles in Dan's leg.

My legs have recovered, actually, nicely.

I've gotten lots of hair back.

Was painful, wan't it?

Yeah!

And he kept messing it up,

so we kept having to do it all the time.

Well the thing is, on a macro lens, your depth is nothing,

so I'd be framing up on some hair follicles

and I'd rip the thing off, but it would pull up the skin.

[Dan] Skin moves.

[Gavin] Pulls the skin towards the camera,

which would pull it completely out of focus.

So he was like can you just do it again?

Except, like, not so like much?

Yeah, humans are a bit too fleshy to use macro lenses on.

Pretty gross.

Pennywise Loker asks if money was no object,

what's the one video you would want to make?

Something in space?

Maybe an Aston Martin doing a corkscrew into a helicopter?

Or something.

Something like Die Hard.

Well that's just unnecessarily wasteful, man.

Money's no object!

Could just be any other car into anything else.

Yeah.

If we had the money to buy a new planet

and set off a huge nuke.

Kay, right, okay.

Well, I don't know,

I'm trying to come up with money no object thing.

Fine.

They didn't say impossible, they said money no object.

Is there a place where you can buy a new planet

and blow it up?

No!

Elon Musk will sort it out.

Brilliant.

He'll get it done.

Oliver_crush asks what is the best way to make good

slow motion videos with a low budget?

Well conversely, actually, I would say that

our slow-mo videos have an incredibly low budget.

The most important thing with slow-mo is

you need a lot of light.

So go outside probably.

Well that was fun.

That was awesome.

Thank you so much for your questions.

We had a lovely time answering them.

Be sure to check out the Super Slow Show,

you can find it on Youtube, on our channel,

subscribe to The Slow Mo Guys cause that's where it is.

Dan gets hurt.

Um, yeah.