Sunday 29 January 2012

What a blast...





Oli was tasked with recording a blast test on an armoured Land Rover recently. The vehicle having already been shot to pieces was then subjected to a simulated attack with grenades from underneath. Any incursion by shrapnel fragments would have meant failure of the project. The problem being that being close enough to get a shot also meant being rather peppered with said shrapnel. The solution was to set the camera up inside a metal box (shown bottom right of middle picture) shooting into a front silvered mirror at 45 degrees. (a normal mirror would produce a double image). Oli stood at the top of a building and fired his cameras on long electronic cable releases, judging when to press the button on the countdown of the firing officer. Curiously a standard video shot at the same time didn't show the orange blast at all!  Case of getting the right 1000th of a second. The test was carried out at The Cranfield Ordnance Test and Evaluation Centre (COTEC)