It took 48 cameras and a lot of post-production work to create the two videos that form Ryan Enn Hughes' 360 Project.
The Canadian artist teamed up with cinematographers The Big Freeze, Zelig Sound in London and two very different dance troupes to produce the videos, which saw dancers perform within a circle of cameras.
Speaking to Wired.co.uk, Hughes said: "Photographing in 360 degrees is a really appealing process. As a single photographer with a single lens, you are limited to a single angle of view.
Photographing in 360 degrees allows you to capture every angle of view along an axis. With all angles photographed, the dominant variable in image making becomes the decisive moment. I think that's the appeal of the process."
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The Big Freeze chose to use 48 Nikon D700 cameras, because of the model's good performance in low light.
Capturing the images, though, was the simplest part of the process, says Hughes: "The biggest technical process was definitely post-production. The workflow jumped between five different software packages -- so a lot of little problems consistently popped up that had to be resolved."
Hughes says that the project was inspired by Michel Gondry's music video for "Like a Rolling Stone". He explains: "Before I was obsessed with photography, I was obsessed with music videos. I was really interested in the technical process that created the "frozen moments" that seemed to be "moving in three-dimensions". Figuring out how this effect was achieved was the beginning of The 360 Project.
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Hughes chose to work with dancers, explaining: "You could certainly photograph anything within the camera array. I chose to specifically work with dancers because of the compositional shapes and emotions that they can evoke with their art form."
However, photographing dancers in the round has a long history; and is a key part of the Degas and the Ballet exhibition currently on at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. In the early days of the medium, photographing movement (as a series of stills) was a painstaking process. Subjects had to be completely still, which could mean deploying clamps or ropes to keep them in position before changing the set up to capture their next position.
In the 1860s, Francois Willème created a process called photosculpture, for which a subject had to sit completely still within a circle of cameras (click to the end of our gallery below to see his series of images of a child whose head is clamped into position). The resulting images were then used to create sculptures. The photographs were projected onto a screen and then
a pantograph used to match up the image to a 3D likeness created in clay.
In the following decades, photography pioneers Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey captured the locomotion of humans and animals, with Marey declaring that "movement is the most apparent characteristic of life". Fortunately, though, for Hughes' ballet and krump dancers, the clamps and ropes have been relegated to the photographic history books.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
