Continuing our “ESPER Customer Stories” series where we ask our clients to share their experiences using multi-camera setups.
Today we talk with Bill Hamway, the Owner of Mammoth – a photo booth company that creates unforgettable brand activations with photo & bullet time booths.
With the help of Bill, we uncover some very interesting findings from his journey about how using bullet time photography has opened up new opportunities.
Let’s dive right in.
Or, click here to listen to Bill’s full story.
Tells us about Mammoth?
Mammoth is an experiential marketing studio that dreams up ideas, then builds them. We blend psychology, art, and marketing to make brand activations unforgettable.
We help brands reach people through everything from festivals to private parties. We help our customers attract attention, spark conversations, create raving fans, and grow their companies.
We have also run activations for big conferences and industry-leading brands like Lululemon, Starbucks, Hulu, and WeWork have trusted us to deliver unforgettable experiences for their guests.
Click here to see ESPER TriggerBox customer gallery.
What challenges did you have before switching to the ESPER kit?
Our company has historically done just straight photo booths for events and so bullet time was something that I was interested in and wanted to add to our business.
It took a bunch of work to try out different systems.
First, we went with a Chinese vendor, Cam Fi. They had sold multi-camera triggers and it was all based on Ethernet or Wireless transfer. So I chose them because it’s the only thing that I could find. I don’t even think ESPER had a website back then, so I needed to take action and decided to try Cam Fi.
And it was terrible.
They didn’t have any image calibration. Their triggering systems were sporadic, it would work sometimes it wouldn’t sometimes and when you’re doing events as you needed to work a 100% of the time.
So, I returned all of the original Cam Fi units.
I then purchased another trigger box that had that could trigger all of our cameras, but there was no time delaying functions on them.
That would be okay if I was using continuous lighting for triggering all of our cameras. But since I come from a photography background, I wanted to use two photography strobes. One for a face light and one for a hair light to make our 3D photos really pop.
Quality is one of the most important things to me.
What is it about ESPER boxes that made them ideal for your needs?
I had already tried your competitor’s products and they let me down. ESPER is just the go-to in the industry and so I went for you.
Thankfully, ESPER came out with your new website. I ordered like right away, one of the first rounds of the TriggerBoxes and PowerBoxes!
I knew that I could do some time delays for triggering our strobes which got me the desired effect. All I wanted was all of the camera shutters being able to open and stay open long enough to be able to capture the light from the strobes. So that’s why I went with ESPER and I’m a super big fan of your products!
I had already tried your competitors products and they let me down. ESPER is just the go-to in the industry and so I went for you.
Also, the design of your ESPER TriggerBox is how they all stacked neatly together was crucial for the design of our bullet time photo booth. That way everything was pretty well together, compact and it was small.
You have the brand and the support behind it.
Luke from sales acted as a kind of a customer service person.
He helped me out when your software wasn’t working for me and with stuff getting stuck in customs and being delayed even though we had events.
And, how have the ESPER boxes been working out for you?
I’m grateful for you investing your time and actually building your products and making good products that are trustworthy that I can count on to do all of our events, so thanks.
We wouldn’t be doing bullet time photography without ESPER.
People see 13 cameras and they’re immediately intrigued. Then when they actually see the results of it, you get: “How the heck does that even work?”, “That’s so cool!”, “I’ve never seen this before!”.
We started doing conferences at the end of last year.
One was for the Hero Roundtable. They’re kind of they’re similar to TED Talks to where they bring a bunch of people who are advocating for big changes in our world together.
We also did a conference in Detroit called the Midwest Gathering. That was a two-day conference and everybody absolutely loved being able to get their bullet time photos taken and they were also curious about how it all worked everything.
I’m grateful for you investing your time and actually building your products and making good products that are trustworthy that I can count on to do all of our events, so thanks.
We’ve done an activation with Lululemon for the Detroit marathon which was in November. They hosted a cheer station for all of their team members and a lot of their brand ambassadors to come out. We went and set up at like 4 o’clock in the morning and it was super cold and super windy, but we made it happen and everybody loved it.
We’ve had some notable people. Perhaps, the biggest name we’ve had is Joe Gatto from the show Impractical Jokers.
That’s thanks to ESPER and you creating the hardware for us to power our equipment and we’ll do many many more events this year so I’m pretty pumped for that.
So, bullet time and your ESPER boxes are making you money!
Yeah, we’ve made money and we’ll continue to make money doing bullet time photography this year!
In fact, we made more money last year than we ever have before.
This year will make exponentially more money. Partially due to bullet time photography and partially just due to where we’re growing as a business.
Yeah, we’ve made money and we’ll continue to make money doing bullet time photography this year! In fact, we made more money last year than we ever have before.
Being able to do bullet time photography and multi-camera work gets us a unique selling point that most other businesses do not have.
Also, the quality that we get from ESPER by being able to actually use real photography strobes to produce amazing looking 3D photos.
Even a lot of our competitors who are using or building multi-camera rigs are just using continuous lighting because they don’t have advanced knowledge of photography. Or, they don’t have an ESPER that allows them to delay the strobe outputs, which gives us the best-in-class quality.
Being able to do bullet time photography and multi-camera work gets us a unique selling point that most other photo booth businesses do not have.
That gets us into more events, bigger music festivals, bigger conferences and so that’s part of where our company is swimming up to this year.
Learn more about ESPER TriggerBox.
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