Gatorade Use Strobes, Not CGI, To Create World's First 'Water Droplet Human'

For their latest advert, the famous drink brand Gatorade has taken waterdrop photography to a whole new level.

If you've dabbled in waterdrop photography, you were probably ecstatic when you captured the perfect splash shape in your small home setup but Gatorade has definitely 'top trumped' you on this with their human figure made entirely from water droplets. 

Usually, these types of ideas look really cool and realistic but you soon realise CGI is involved and the idea soon becomes not so exciting but this awesome ad was created entirely with strobes, a complicated water dropping rig and some motion capture technology. 

2500 switches were constructed and had to be switched on / off withing two milliseconds so the water droplets could be frozen mid-air, by a series of flashes, and captured.

 Motion capture was used to give the 'rain rig' the information it needed to be able to process a series of calculations to produce the human-sized water figure. This was combined with a motion controller that sent a message to the camera sync and flash to tell them to fire at the exact moment the water droplets fell. 

The results are so good, it's hard to believe computer generated trickery wasn't used. Take a look at the commercial above and you can watch the 'making of' tutorial over on YouTube (we couldn't share it unfortunately). 

(Via Fstoppers)