Awesome / The Slow Mo Guys

Given that the series is about slow motion, no doubt things will look awesome at 5000 FPS.

• The butane rocket. A bit of (rough) science revealed the canister was travelling at over 220+ MPH, about as fast as an exotic super-car. Also the fact that the video opened with Gavin counting down when it would explode. He was mostly on the money: it exploded as he said one.
• Lloyd the cat, both showing a jump in slow-motion of how she absorbs the shock with her front legs and how she runs — not climbs, runs — up a fence, making it look like she's defying gravity.
• Droplet collisions. Two minutes worth of footage of drops colliding into each-other took place in just over half a second. Just goes to show how much we "miss" when we blink our eyes.
• Gavin filming the demolition of two cooling towers. Dang.
• The six-foot water balloon. The video so impressive that it gave Gavin what he needed to earn a permanent visa and fully join Rooster Teeth.
• Freddie Wong and an army of volunteers water-ballooning Gav and Dan.
• For Battlefield 4's release, EA sponsored the Slow Mo Guys blowing up an entire building.
• Removing the video with Sam Pepper after he made a total ass of himself.

• And they return for 2014's "rewind" with Gavin getting the Ice Bucket Challenge in slow motion!

• After many trials, Gav was finally able to complete the Jackie Chan coin challenge. Words cannot express the joy on his face.
• So, after the 10,000fps video, Gav said that because of how the camera works, they couldn't get any slower footage without doing a lower quality. Well, times change, and so have their cameras, these ones capable of capturing up to about 170,000f/s. Amazing how technology marches on, isn't it?
  • The numbers are rather impressive. At a rate of 170,600 FPS, the camera records footage 6824 times slower than real time, and just four seconds of footage takes seven and a half hours to play back at 25 FPS and takes up 96 gigabytes of space.
  • It's beaten by an impressive 343,000 FPS used to record glass fractures visibly travelling. Five-point-one seconds is enough to generate 1,749,300 individual images of footage that takes nineteen-and-a-half hours to play back. To quote Dan: "I'm gonna be sick!" To add to it, the speed at which the tempered glass handle fractures is 451 times faster than you can blink.
  • All these are exceeded by orders of magnitude in episode ten of Planet Slow-Mo, in which the duo visits CalTech to film light at ten trillion frames per second. It's so fast that the light moves across the screen at a visible pace. One experiment at a "mere" one-hundred billion frames per second makes a femtosecond-long laser pulse bouncing around a mirrored cavity look like a DVD screensaver. And while the camera they used is currently the fastest in the world, CalTech is working on a camera that can film even faster.
  • While it's still dwarfed by the CalTech camera, in 2021 Gavin got his hands on the Phantom TMX 7510, at that point the fastest Phantom ever made. At max resolution, it does around 75,000 frames per second; drop that resolution down and it has a maximum recording speed of 1.75 million frames per second. While he doesn't get up to that speed in the first video featuring it, he's able to get a visible recording of glass cracks travelling at 800,000 FPS, still the fastest recording speed on the channel. To compare with the above, two-point-two seconds of footage would take forty-four hours to play back.
  • And just when you think Gavin's own equipment couldn't get any faster, he casually drops some 5 million frames per second shots when filming some shaped charges.
• Dan maintaining his badass pose during the "Deal With It"◊ meme recreation.
• Shattering a mirror with a hammer lets the duo discover that it creates a visible shockwave in the glass! Gav and Dan discuss how looks the scene in The Matrix when the helicopter crashes into a building, wondering if the directors actually knew about this or if they got it right by chance.
• The hosts deserve mention here. Gavin has built a dream life for himself making content and playing video games for a living, and the only reason Dan hasn't followed him into it is because he's an actively serving soldier who does the show during leave.
• Gavin shot the wick of a lit candle for a video. It took many attempts and near successed and was something even Dan didn't do (remember, Dan's a soldier and has a whole lot more experience with guns than Gav).
• The Diving into 1000 Mousetraps in 4k Slow Motion. They spent four hours placing 1000 mousetraps on a trampoline with Daniel jumping in them, without any protection (he forgot to put on the goggles). The best part? He wasn't harmed, at all!
• Dan and Gav team up with none other than the Blue Man Group, smashing all sorts of things from candy bowls to wine glasses to ceramic busts of the Blue Men (much to their unease). Ah, the wanton destruction...
  • Props to the first thing they smash, or rather fail to smash: a block of ballistic gel. The gel block just goes "nice try" and bounces the bowling ball away with minimal damage!
• One for an object: during the "Katana vs. Bottles" video, one of the bottles Dan cuts through is cut so cleanly that it actually catches the water inside it when it lands on the table.
  • Dan gets better at using the katana with every slice; he only fails the 16-bottle slice because his swing clipped the table.
• The video of them firing the M82 .50 BMG rifle, filmed at such a high speed that you can clearly see the bullet exit the barrel, both spinning and etched from the rifling. You can even see the sonic boom emanating from the bullet travelling faster than sound.
• The video Gavin made about how screens work. At high enough frame rates, you can clearly see screens, both CRT and LCD, updating line-by-line. He even went further with a segment not relating to slow mo by getting a high-power macro lens and showing how each individual pixel (LCD) or phosphor (CRT) is made up of segments of red, green and blue.
• The existence of the Super Slow Show. Tired of having to stick with mostly small-scale slow-mo videos filmed in the confines of Gavin's back garden, Gavin and Dan convinced YouTube to fund a series of 48 videos over 16 weeks in a purpose built staging area. That's more than double the amount of videos they released in 2017.
• Massive Explosive Chain Reaction at 200,000 FPS has the duo play with various explosions, but the last explosion takes the friggin' cake. They use an Avalancher (what is used to trigger man-made avalanches on potentially unstable snow slopes) to fire a blast into a barrel full of ammonium nitrate fuel with two five-pound boosters strapped to the barrel. The explosion is so massive that the walls of the testing ground are caked with mud, a blast shelter is caved in and moves several feet, and one of the windows to the explosion-proof room is literally punched out of its screws, knocking down one of the Phantoms. Luckily, the footage on it wasn't lost.
• It turns out that the "Underwater Explosions" video is a direct inspiration for a mountain explosion sequence in Solo.
• Come 2019, The Super Slow Show is being completely blown out of the water. This time, YouTube have funded a new series called Planet Slow-Mo, in which Gav and Dan travel the world to film things in slow motion they've never seen before. It gets off to a running start — the very first episode features a Phantom mounted on a drone pointed straight into the mouth of an Icelandic geyser.
  • While the whole premise is awesome in and of itself, taking that shot meant the camera and drone tanked a direct hit from the geyser's spray, and they didn't break.
• Episode six of Planet Slow-Mo almost literally blows all of their previous firearms videos out of the water — since they're firing a shell from a Sherman M-8 tank. And just when that's over, they then move on to firing a Russian D-20 anti-vehicle gun with a 152mm barrel that is the largest gun in private ownership in the world.
  • And while filming for the second, two moments. Funny: Dan whiffs the first shot. Awesome: The watermelons they had in the line of fire deflected the second round. The boys have come a very long way from firing air rifles in Gavin's back yard.
• In a collab with Rhett And Link of Good Mythical Morning, Gav and Dan try their hand at breaking champagne bottles with sabres. Dan's is a bit messy, Rhett's is pretty good, and Gavin's is almost perfect, as is Link's (eventually). Then, for extra effect, they decide that Dan's going to have another go and show how not to do it, i.e. shattering the bottle. Dan promptly takes the cork out and nothing else.
• Gavin decides to 'borrow' a slow motion idea from Corridor Digital — slicing an arrow in motion with a katana, only at higher framerates. He and Dan arrived really early and only brought six arrows, anticipating many missed shots before Dan actually hit them. Dan then continues his trend of developing Improbable Aiming Skills and slices every arrow on the first try. A distance/time measurement shows that he's only 0.009 milliseconds off hitting them directly in the middle.
  • On their last arrow shoot, Gavin accidentally nails the $1500 SmallHD monitor attached to the camera. He put the video of the incident up on the second channel. The video earned back the cost of a replacement monitor in ad revenue almost immediately.
• Dan breaks out the firearms again to shoot some Newton's Cradles in slowmo. After a few shots to get his eye in — mostly hitting the base of the cradles - he nails the first ball and the bullet simply explodes. Predictable when you consider it's a clash of soft lead against much harder steel, but the effect is still spectacular.
• Dan manages to peak at playing pool when he fires the cue ball at the table with a cannon at 400mph and pots two balls with it.

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