Infra-red gates, sound triggers, hand-built delay units and lasers. All the cool stuff involved with high-speed photography is something that still makes me so charged about these projects. The tweaking and preparations that might take days before the actual shot and the excitement when it's finally time to pull the trigger.
The most frequently asked question is, how many lightbulbs or test tubes you went through before you got everything right in shot x? Incredibly the answer often is just one. Either I must be lucky or have some ability to estimate what the needed delay is and how the fragments will disperse. I do usually prepare for more takes, and sometimes this surplus of props leads to more shots, as was the case with Stopping Time.
