Modelphilia wrote:
You've brought back some great memories of my time working for Richard Foster in Chicago during the 1980's. He was one of the top two food photographers in Chicago and the mid-West, who had then gone on to also become one of the top tv-commercial directors there. Working as a freelancer, I did the sets, on-set assisting, and special effects.

In one shoot for Dean Foods (titled "Bursting With Flavor") he hired two brothers from Arizona who had designed what was then the world's fastest 35-mm movie camera, which they had been employed with in the making of many well-known studio movies (Catch-22, etc.). The camera came WITH the two brothers, the only ones permitted to operate it. Just for fun, Richard and crew figured out how fast the film was going through the camera. It turned out to be 60 MPH (!), snapping each frame along the way. Amazing!

I had rigged a yogurt-container (with its bottom removed) over a hole in a plexiglass sheet so that, absolutely as soon as the assistant cameraman could yell "Speed!" (to indicate when it was at top speed), I pushed up on a plunger from beneath the plexiglass cyc-table to throw a container-full of fruit up into the air for the slow-motion capture. By the time the AC finished his yell the shot was over.

Fun times!

Sounds like tons of fun. Well, except maybe if you're the one who has to clean up after the shot and the food and everything is all over the place. But it would still be worth it. I remember seeing a short documentary on the filming of an Indiana Jones movie in a tunnel in which they had taken a Nikon 35mm camera and put a back on it to hold a hundred feet of film (could have been more) and rigged it up to shoot high speed of the era. It was very interesting and a lot of work to get just a half minute or so of footage.

Closest I ever got to that kind of action was when the FBI would bring bank robbery film to me in my lab to get it developed. No one else in town could run their long rolls. And an agent had to be in the dark with me to maintain the chain of evidence. I have no idea how they found out I had a spool that held long rolls. They didn't want to run it through the roller type machines for fear it would get hung up.