A cinematography technique involving a very large amount of cameras. First seen for music videos and commercials, and later adapted for films.

A series of cameras are set up around a location and synchronized so that they will take pictures either all at the same time, or in a sequence. These pictures are then used to "freeze time", as you can show the event from one of many angles.

See: bullet time

Yes, my son, seeing you stand so long in front of the bathroom mirror devoting your entire life to your hair recalls to me those distant yet immediate times when I too was fifteen years of age with an entire life to give to my hair, hair a lot darker and more crowded than it is now; yes, I too stood in front of the mirror every ten minutes or so to check my DA, greased beyond the physically possible with that scented pomade whose name I've long forgotten that meant life itself to me, as did the back-pocket rat-tail comb in my hand, haven't seen one of those combs in decades, my as yet unjaded eyes staring deeply into what I hoped was the future, trying to get a glimpse, trying to become... to become what, I'm not sure even now, but whatever it was I don't think I became it, at least I hope not, but back then I wanted to become anything other than what I was, what I had; I wanted different hair, different face, different teeth, different skin, different body, different personality, different life, different world, just everything different, if possible (and over the years it all came true, though not in one instance the way I wanted), which natural adolescent hormonally molten want was only just then beginning to be superheated by the media explosion, and suddenly there were ideals to emulate all over the place, and all in commercial perfection, making it harder than ever to be a teenager because to begin with when you're a teenager you're not fully here yet, you're still forming, and are right at the stage when you need an ideal, that traditionally was found in one's family, or village, but suddenly how could mere fathers or mothers or neighbors compete with James Dean and Elvis Presley? Which made for practically insurmountable self-contrast as well, but then you grew up and noted some years later that the guy down the street who used to have the perfect hair was now stone bald and a lot shorter than you recall, and having trouble with his joints, and you realized that what you had was not so bad after all, in fact it could be an ideal just now coming into its own, and you also realize that anyway what a very, very thin slice of life is there in the mirror at any one time, especially on top. Always remember that, son.

A slice of life is a type of short story that is very brief, often less than 500 words, (~2 doublespaced pages) that gives a brief recount of a chunk of a person's life in a dramatic fashion. This is also known as a viginette or short short.

Ironically, though this is one of the more cutting edge techniques currently, the aim is somewhat similar to the work that arguably spawned the medium of film. In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge made a series of pictures of a horse crossing the finish line for the first photo finish. This entailed setting up a series of cameras to take many pictures, resulting in a sequence of images of the horse in motion from a number of different vantages, much as this new technique produces a series of nearly simultaneous images from different angles. Funny how things come full circle.

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