Chris Bryan’s Phantom high-speed camera: an amazing window on the world

Chris Bryan teeters on a ledge holding a $200,000 camera, wearing flippers, as huge surf explodes. What is he doing?

TWAM 12 Dec 2015

Cinematographer Chris Bryan had been travelling the world filming wild ocean sequences for the movie remake of Point Break – and then he came home to Cronulla and the weather gods put on a day like this on his very doorstep.

Here he is standing on a rocky point at Kurnell with his camera, huge swells hitting a ledge below him and exploding with the sound of “semi-trailers colliding head-on”, he says. You can’t see it, but he’s wearing flippers, which might save his skin if he’s washed in but rule out the possibility of running like hell from a rogue wave. “There’s nowhere to run anyway,” he reasons. “You just have to crouch down low and hang on for dear life.”

That’s a $200,000 bit of kit in his hand, a Phantom Flex4K high-speed digital movie camera that shoots a thousand frames per second. (A regular movie camera, by contrast, shoots 25fps.) Bryan records with the Phantom in short bursts – a necessity when even a three-second clip takes up 32GB of storage – and the footage is designed to be viewed in slow motion. It’s an exquisite technique, revealing details and layers of beauty that are lost to the naked eye in real time.

This was a special occasion for Bryan, 39, in more ways than one. His first child, Matilda, had been born the previous day, three weeks premature. Still buzzing on adrenalin from the birth, filming those colossal seas felt like “a celebration, a welcoming to the world” for his little girl. His wife Katie didn’t see it quite like that though. “When the photographer emailed me this shot Katie was like, ‘You’ve got a baby! What were you thinking?’”

VIDEO: Bryan’s spectacular showreel