Vogue’s bullet-time film at its 2026 fashion gala was shot on a sphere of 70 iPhone 18 Pro cameras, up from an arc of 60 iPhone 17 Pro cameras in the 2025 version of the same system.
Media Storm founder Tim Pan posted the result on X, and the Chinese creator team built the rig for the Vogue Fashion Power Gala in Suzhou, which ended on October 23. Media Storm calls it the VOGUE Ball, and its behind-the-scenes video went up on October 26.
A sphere of iPhones replaces last year’s arc
Bullet time freezes a moment while the camera appears to circle the subject. The 2025 version used 60 iPhone 17 Pro cameras on an arc with every camera synced to the same moment, so the virtual camera could only orbit on one horizontal plane.
Each of those phones carried a Blackmagic Camera ProDock for sync lock while a HyperDeck Studio 4K Pro sent the genlock signal to all of them, and the Blackmagic Camera app set resolution, frame rate and exposure across every iPhone over the network. The Shortcuts app sent the footage to a server automatically, DaVinci Resolve Studio handled the edit, and a finished clip took about five minutes from capture to output.
The new setup adds 10 cameras and wraps them into a full sphere, which lets a shot move above, below and around the person standing inside. Media Storm also added an algorithm that removes the rig from the frame, so the finished footage shows no stands or phones.
Four Mac Studio computers sit behind the sphere for on-site editing, and the team goes from the end of a take to a finished clip in about an hour. The same iPhone bullet-time system was used at an Apple event in Shanghai in March 2026.
Vogue. Shot on 70 iPhone 18 Pro https://t.co/v7SCM1a6EE
— Tim Pan (@mediastorm_en) October 26, 2026
The iPhone 18 Pro aperture and 4D Gaussian plans
Media Storm said on October 24 that it will optimize the system further with 4D Gaussian reconstruction, a technique that rebuilds a scene in three dimensions over time so a virtual camera can move anywhere after the shoot. Pan has explained that the method needs a very fast shutter speed and no motion blur, which means stopping the aperture down and lighting the set brightly.
That is where the variable aperture camera in the iPhone 18 Pro comes in, since it can narrow the lens from f/1.48 to f/4 on Apple’s own hardware. The 2025 rig on iPhone 17 Pro cameras had no such control.
The guests at the gala included Liu Yifei, Dilraba Dilmurat, Yang Zi and Bai Lu. Media Storm’s bullet-time system has now gone from 60 cameras in an arc to 70 in a sphere in a single year.
