I mean, you get a yellow board, turntable, tall glass, and a lime.

Tastes good. How did they get the lime to land like that,

and the water to arc straight up when it's rotating, and why doesn't the ice go to

the side if it's spinning? How does it move in slow motion but spin so

fast? We ended up calling the spinning rig of death,

I think is, was the the technical term we gave the the whole device.

I'm Steve Giralt. I'm a director and visual engineer.

I found it's easier to start with saying I'm a TV commercial director that does food and

beverage. That's like the core. Beginning. Then I say, but we use all sorts of crazy

robots and rigs and things to do it, because we need super accurate timing and control

of events and impacts It's kind of art meets science.

You know, I think it's, it's fun to pick one specific example to kind of start off.

We sort of landed on that, that Jack Daniel's Honey commercial, just because it looks so

simple. They came to us with this idea and they're

like, “Oh, we want to drop a lime wedge into the drink and want to see it kind of

splash out while the camera's spins around it.”

So we're kind of like, “are you sure you need the camera's spinning around the thing?

We can't just spend the drink on a little turntable and that would be a million times

easier.” And they're like, “no no no, we want the

parallax of it running around.” And I'm like, “But you want this in super slow motion,”

and they're like, “yeah, yeah, we want it in super slow motion.” I'm like, “well,

that means we've got to spend insanely fast. Cause once you slow it down, you're not moving

very fast.” And they're like, “yeah, yeah, let's do that.”

So on the bottom here, we've got weights that are holding the rig down.

Yeah. Yep. Because otherwise it's going to fly out the

window. It'll wiggle itself to the point that it falls

apart. Yeah. So basically that platform is going straight

to the ground, which is tied into all the weights and everything.

On that there's an arm that's coming out about six feet and then it's on a riser that's coming

up and the camera is bolted to that. Basically it was afour horsepower motor, you

know, driving this, this, you know, pulley around and around and run around. We got it

up to a hundred RPM. The other challenge that, you know, we didn't

think about right away is like, Oh wait. So if everything's spinning, how do you power

the camera? How do you get video off the camera, how do you power the lights that are on board

this spinning rig? We had a case full of batteries on the rig

itself that spun with the whole thing. We speed up the motor, go, go, go, go, go,

go, go until we're at the full, safe speed as we, we find it is the right level before

it things start getting unbalanced or scary to us.

It's a Phantom Veo 4k, so that'll do a thousand frames a second at four K resolution RAW.

We learned that, you know, the tripod head that we had mounted on it, the way the second

it got faster, that the camera just started like, yeah, tilting up like this. So we're

like, okay, we gotta make our own custom mounts. So we kind of just basically bolted the a

hundred thousand dollars Phantom camera to this.

The way that the Phantom camera works is different than any other camera. It actually doesn't

record to like a card. The Phantom actually records to just a RAM

buffer. So basically it just records until you hit

stop and it recorded the previous six seconds. It'll overwrite itself, so basically it's

constantly erasing what happened six seconds ago.

As if you didn't have enough pressure already. So we, we actually rigged a little, uh, RC

car servo. So like push the button via a little remote control, you know, for us also.

We started out with a piece of plywood that we curved, um, and then actually in early

testing, it broke, um, halfway through the spin.

We did a laminate kind of like what you use for countertops.

Within that too, we needed to make sure the drink looked good.

The food stylist would do that. Um, and that's, you know, one of our challenges is that the

lighting has to be great. Once we got the rig, we got the cameras secured,

we got the lighting figured out, and then we had to drop a lime in the center of this

thing on cue. So, uh, we had to build another device, um,

to do that. So basically a remote control device that

we mounted to the ceiling that had like little hinges, like kind of barn doors that just

kinda like flapped open when we, when you push the button so that we preloaded the lime,

we spun up the speed and then psh and then there went boom, down into the drink and get

the, you know, that, let us get the aim right. So we have three robots. They're six axis

robots. They have names. There's one right behind

me here as the bolt, which we call Bob. And then there's Robbie, which is like, this

is a small version of Bob. And then we have Johnny five, which is our like slightly different

robot, uh, that doesn't work under the same software. So, you know, Johnny five is alive,

you know? “Hi honey, I'm home!”

“Number 5?” (Laughter)

The bolt initially, when you come to see your work it's sort of the showstopper for an outsider

like me, but then you realize that actually the crazy stuff is all the stuff that you're

making. I guess from the beginning you realized you'd

need to program supplementary robots to better control the motion of objects.

I started as a still photographer just doing still photos.

I started as a hobby taking classes in like MIG, welding, and TIG welding and woodworking

and plastics and epoxies and micro circuits and Maya.

I went down a multi-year continuing-ed rabbit hole.

I watch a few videos and like, okay, great. Now I know how to do that. Like here we go,

download initiated, you know?” Did you have, did you have any thoughts on

that, like on what would constitute the creative breakthrough for you?

You know, I, I don't give up very easily. If I plug in, it's just like, I'll keep going

until four in the morning or whatever it is. If it's like, if I'm making progress towards

something. Problem solving is like the core of my passions. It's just like, is, is how

do I solve that problem? Can I make it even better? You know, and the next time, can I

make it better?”

I had a lot of fun talking to Steve and learning about the work that he and his crew are doing.

It is crazy, it is super cool, so I want to make sure to thank our sponsor, which is Verizon.

They've got an occasion they are celebrating, they've turned on 5g nationwide. Guessing

you've heard of 5g. Well, with 5g nationwide and in more and more cities, you get this

unprecedented performance of 5g Ultrawideband. It is the world's fastest 5g — that means

it's really really really fast. You can download an album to your phone in a few seconds.

Basically, it's not just going to change how your phone works, it's gonna change

how pretty much everything works. There are a lot of creative breakthroughs that are going

to come from this technology and I'm really excited to see what they're gonna be. This

is the 5g that America's been waiting for, and it's only from Verizon. They don't

directly impact our editorial, but their support makes videos like this possible.