The Art of Mixing Firearms and Computers
Many people have watched in wonderment as directors spend tons of money
making superb slow motion shots for films and music videos. So, my posessed
dog convinced me to do some work on the idea and see how good things would turn out on a
budget of zero dollars. It turned out to be quite a bit of work, especially on such a hot
day. First things first, however, was the acquisition of firearms. This one was easy,
simply use the family .22 caliber bolt-action rifle. The next hassle was to find
amunition. I was kind-of reluctant, but I had to steal 26 rounds from my brother, so don't
tell him. The shells are your standard el-cheapo Federal Lightning .22 caliber cartridges.
For any that are curious, the bullet itself is lead, just goes to show this ain't the good
stuff. If I accidentaly shot myself, I'd die of lead poisoning.
Ok, so now we know what I'm going to be shooting, but,
you say, "bullets travel faster than the speed of sound, how you gonna catch it on
film?" Well, this would be an easy question to answer if I had some money to throw at
it, but I do not. So a high-speed camera is right out. My father just a few months ago
purchased a brand new digital camera, but he is at the beach with it, so cannot use that.
But all is not lost, because before the digital wonder I just spoke of, we had a pretty
good Realistic MovieCorder which now sits neglected in my father's study closet. The
kicker is the fact that this old neglected camera has a feature I havn't heard of anywhere
else: "High Speed Shutter" mode. Most video cameras record all light information
during a 1/30 second time period into each frame. If there is fast motion, things quickly
get blury. But not in High Speed Shutter mode, it only captures for 1/100th a second for
each frame to try and limit the motion blurring effect, all it requires is a ton of light
and light I have. It is currently severe clear about 2pm in the afternoon, a perfect
solution, I wasn't planning to shoot indoors. However, this being an analog NTSC based
video camera is both good and bad. First the bad, the video resolution is a bit lower than
the European PAL standard and MUCH lower than the more modern digital cameras. But, there
are two good things: first, the frame rate is a full 29.97 frames per second, faster than
PAL. Also, I have no problem with running the analog signal across about 50 feet of RCA
cable into my computer in the living room to be encoded into MPEG1 in realtime. No video
tape was used in order to attain the best quality and because the camera can no longer
record to tape, the reason we replaced it. After being filmed into MPEG1 in realtime
(664MB), the video was translated into DivX ;-) MPEG4
without the audio(41MB). Finally, the video was cut up and had their frame
rates reduced to 6 frames per second for slow motion viewing, about 1/5 the original
speed.
- Front after first shot
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First up for the slaughter, was a really old 130MB
Seagate Hard Drive. Before shooting, I had no idea whether or not I could shoot through
it. But, I had told all my friends I would do it, for science. Anyway, I set it atop it's
target position and aimed the camera. I loaded the weapon, took a knee and aimed, crack!
The rifle let loose and punched a hole about 4/5th of the way through, through everything
but the circuit board on the bottom. The bullet disentigrated into molten lead on impact
which coated the inside of the wound. Although fatal, the hard-drive did stop the bullet.
Note to all police officers: Wearable computers are a GOOD idea :-) |
- Back after first shot
|
- After all the shooting, the front is kinda holy
|
Susequent shots into various regions of the hard-drive
provided rather interesting results. A shot closer to the center of the spindle didn't get
nearly as deep as the first. Second shot was like the first, except it left a perfect
impact term of molten lead, no jaged edges. Then a diagonal shot to the hind quarter of
the hard-drive drove straight through, leaving a thin layer of molten lead on the top
plate and the actuator which was just obliterated. Something curious though, the circuit
board on the bottom broke out in a square pattern. Want more pictures? Click-Here |
 - The back is kinda hard to see the damage, but it is there
|
A first shot into the hard-drives left side managed to go through
the entire drive! It punched through the mounting bracket and skidded across the top of
the circuit board finally squeasing passed the mounting bracket on the other side. A
second shot in the same side hit back-higher, slicing through a warrantee label and half
and inch deep into the platters.
Well, I have video of the hard-drive getting thrown around by the rifle. I'm not kidding,
everytime I shot it, except when I missed, the harddrive wen't flying, landing between 4
and 12 inches away. Do not forget to hold down shift when you click on the video links in
order to download the video and not just view it once :-)
Finally, my pride and joy! After making the hard-drive
the most holy drive I've ever seen, I took my inabitions out on water. That is right,
water containers. First up: a three liter coke bottle that put on a helluva show! I was
able to put out three shots into this baby before the water level was gone. Every shot
turned out very impressive.
Next up: a half-gallon milk-jug on its side weakily taped to the target position.
Final in the video department: a whole-gallon milk-jug loosely held in place
by a small log.
Check out the target stand after all this shooting.
I'm still working on the Hard-Drive video shots, but it doesn't look good. Water is the
only thing that moves slow enough for the camera to catch it, it is still only 30fps.
Also, I suggest you try viewing the videos at differing frame rates, download avifrate.exe
to change it, kinda self explanatory once you run it. This concludes the project. Later
all :-)
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