The Evolution of Paintball Guns: 1987-2009

[The Inflicted]

[DocsMachine]

Nice, and cool collection. I wonder if there's a way you could smooth the tracking- I've seen guys set up an electric train track and mount the camera on the engine.

An overcast day might get you more even lighting, too.

Plus, while I'm being picky, I think you skipped a couple.

Doc.

[The Inflicted]

Nice, and cool collection. I wonder if there's a way you could smooth the tracking- I've seen guys set up an electric train track and mount the camera on the engine.

An overcast day might get you more even lighting, too.

Plus, while I'm being picky, I think you skipped a couple.

Doc.

Glad you liked it. It was surprisingly difficult to get the tracking shot as smooth as it was. I originally tried to film this in my house but was going to have to make the line of guns snake past a staircase and through a doorway, and no matter how many times I tried I just couldn't hold the camera still enough or avoid getting my feet in the shot or something going wrong.. Moving everything outside made it a lot easier, but even then I had trouble with the pacing and smoothness. What ended up working is listening to a 4-second click track in my ears and filming the shot at a high framerate, then slowing it down in the edit. Walking normally and playing back slow yielded way better results than trying to walk slowly and smoothly.

I did try fasting the camera to both a hand truck and my daughter's stroller, but neither looked as smooth as carrying the camera by hand, mostly because the wheels wouldn't roll straight on the surface of my deck boards. There's a few bits where I wanted to move the camera nearer or closer to the subject anyway, depending on the size of the gun, and this would have been far harder to do with the camera on wheels.

It didn't occur to me until just now, but this all would have been a lot easier if I had just flown my drone over the guns. I'd be inclined to try re-filming again, but a lot of the guns you see in the video aren't usually set up like that when they're on my wall- I rearranged a bunch of parts in an effort to make everything more "period correct" than I usually have them, and I'm in no hurry to have to re-arrange everything all over again.

Also, if I were to ever do this again it would be nice to borrow a few more notable markers, like an SMG-60, DM4, 2nd-generation Intimidator. and maybe some sort of modified direct-feed Nelson with a thermal valved tank.

[DocsMachine]

What ended up working is listening to a 4-second click track in my ears and filming the shot at a high framerate, then slowing it down in the edit. Walking normally and playing back slow yielded way better results than trying to walk slowly and smoothly.

-Really? That was clever, I wouldn't have thought of that.

It didn't occur to me until just now, but this all would have been a lot easier if I had just flown my drone over the guns.

-Can you program in a fixed flight path it'd follow?

Also, if I were to ever do this again it would be nice to borrow a few more notable markers, like an SMG-60, DM4, 2nd-generation Intimidator. and maybe some sort of modified direct-feed Nelson with a thermal valved tank.

-Personally, I've always wanted to see a full timeline, sort of an infinite sidescroll webpage, that showed almost this exact sort of thing. But as complete as we could manage as to dates and order, as well as marker- including obscure stuff like the Scorpion, Puma and Top Gun.

Doc.

[The Inflicted]

-Can you program in a fixed flight path it'd follow?

I believe so, but that feature is more for much longer flight plans. It's easy enough to just put it into slow speed, angle the gimbal directly down, and just have it very slowly creep over the subjects. It's a DJI Mini 3 and has no obstacle avoidance, so I'd prefer to just control it myself.

-Personally, I've always wanted to see a full timeline, sort of an infinite sidescroll webpage, that showed almost this exact sort of thing. But as complete as we could manage as to dates and order, as well as marker- including obscure stuff like the Scorpion, Puma and Top Gun.

I'd like to see that too.
In the case of my video the scope was helpfully bound by two things- my own collection and the fact that I was originally making this for a Facebook group that focuses on paintball from '82 to '06,