The Perfect Dunk
Three Oreos, one glass of milk, and a rig that had to do the same thing every single time.
Take fourteen. Maybe fifteen. Honestly, I lost count. Same rig, same drop, same three biscuits. They will not land the same way twice.
This rig was built for a much bigger job, and before I trusted it with that, I stripped it back to something simple. Three Oreos into a glass of milk.
The first version used elastic rubbers and a cylinder would cut to release each object. Not once did it cut cleanly. So it got redesigned: two aluminium profiles, drilled and threaded, washers, nuts and plexiglass shelves.
The Oreos were actually making a pretty nice splash. But in stills we missed it. All our attention was on the drop. So the final image is a composite: a clean plate shot at the start, the big dramatic splash from a fake ice cube dropped into the milk, and the biscuits from the real drop.
Stills on the Canon 5DS R with a TS-E 135mm macro, tilt-shifted so the focus runs across the whole frame. Video on the URSA G2 at 300fps.
Then the real work started. The biscuits dragged on the shelves as they dropped. WD-40 helped a little. Glycerin helped a bit more. But one cylinder still moved differently to the other. In the end it was pressure, glycerin, and barely letting the biscuit touch the rig at all.
Three Broncolor heads doing the main work: one close t0 Lee diffusion filter, one filling from further back, one from the top for the specular highlight.
Video needed a fourth for the background, because an LED tube throws light completely differently to a bare flash.
Full breakdown on YouTube.