Tired of waiting weeks for the Slow Mo Guys’ latest experiment with their high-speed cameras? Over the next 12 weeks, the duo’s new YouTube Original series Super Slow Show is going to deliver an almost daily dose of slo-mo goodness with bigger explosions, celebrity guests and bigger risks, all recorded at thousands of frames per second.
To the uninitiated, the Slow Mo Guys are Gavin Free and Dan Gruchy, two talented and inventive Brits who’ve been coming up with incredibly original and fascinating experiments they capture in excruciating detail using high-speed cameras from Vision Research, including most recently the eye-melting Phantom Flex 4K. They have been sharing their slo-mo videos to their YouTube channel for the past seven years, and have amassed over 10 million subscribers to date, despite an irregular posting schedule that has fans often wondering when they will post next.
Gavin Free has not only given us the opportunity to exclusively reveal the first three installments of the Super Slow Show, he also gave us some insights into what goes into the making of the Slow Mo Guys’ videos, and how the new series opened up some new opportunities to capture slo-mo footage they wouldn’t have been able to on their own.
Gavin and Dan get to live out their stunt person dreams, but as the slo-mo replays reveal, falling onto an airbag can still be terrifying.
If you regularly watch their videos, you might have assumed the Slow Mo Guys spend all their time planning, staging and shooting their elaborate experiments. But slo-mo shenanigans are still mostly a hobby for the pair. Gavin, who’s based in Austin, Texas and has a background in the ins and outs of high-speed photography, works for Rooster Teeth Productions, known for the popular Red vs. Blue series. Meanwhile Dan recently wrapped up a six-year stint in the British Army as, appropriately enough, an explosives expert.
The duo spend most of their free time thinking up the experiments they want to shoot in slow motion, and then only occasionally get together throughout the year to film a bunch of videos in a row. Unsurprisingly, their wishlist of potential slow motion experiments has grown quite a bit over the years, so the Slow Mo Guys have now teamed up with YouTube to help produce their new Super Slow Show.
Everyone looks like an action movie star when running away from explosions in slo-mo, even the Slow Mo Guys.
How will it differ from the videos the Slow Mo Guys have been posting to their YouTube channel for the past seven years? With the Super Slow Show they have a bigger budget, stunt experts, safety personnel, special effects technicians, and a giant desert in which to film explosions, crashes, and other experiments too dangerous for someone’s backyard. It’s another attempt by YouTube to bolster its original content and native channels by throwing money at talented producers, which is exciting when you think about what Gavin and Dan already managed to create on a shoestring budget.
The Slow Mo Guys and the Super Slow Show crew spent about a month in the California desert capturing everything from dunk tank tidal waves, to Hollywood-calibre explosions, to even elaborate car crashes that wouldn’t have been possible with just two guys and a camera they couldn’t afford to risk breaking. You can think of the Super Slow Show as the Slow Mo Guys without the limitations of a day job.
Busting through a wall is a staple of Hollywood action movies, but as slo-mo footage reveals, it isn’t as easy as it looks.
The Slow Mo Guys have fans all over the world, and not just people like you and me looking for a distraction from work during the day. For the Super Slow Show, they were able to enlist the help of celebrities and athletes skilled at doing things the Slow Mo Guys aren’t.
With the help of Kevin Durant, they were able to capture high-speed footage of NBA-calibre slam dunks at speeds far slower than an instant replay could ever deliver. And Tony Hawk, whose kids are big fans of the Slow Mo Guys, even landed a few tricks on camera – although not his famous 900.
The Super Slow Show consists of 12 episodes that will be shared on YouTube over the next 12 weeks, but broken up into smaller videos that will be released four to five times every week. We have the first three above in this post, and the rest of the slo-mo exploits will be periodically doled out on the Slow Mo Guys’ YouTube channel. The success of the Super Slow Show will determine whether or not Gavin and Dan will have more time and opportunities to capture and reveal the intricacies of the world through their high-speed cameras on YouTube’s dime again. But don’t think they will give up the enterprise any time soon. Even after a month of non-stop filming in the desert, their slo-mo wishlist hasn’t gotten any smaller.