How a Gizmo Used to Photograph Taco Ads Took Over the Red Carpet

On a drizzly recent Sunday night, the Art Deco lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza was clogged with celebrities attending "Saturday Night Live" 's fiftieth-anniversary show. Taran Killam, who played Donald Trump on the show in 2015, strolled in wearing a double-breasted tux and stopped cold when he noticed a curly-haired man in a green suit standing beside a rig that looked like a ten-foot-tall Swiss Army knife. "Oh, here it is," Killam said. The man was Cole Walliser, a forty-three-year-old director, and the gizmo was the Glambot, a high-speed camera mounted on a giant robotic arm. Walliser oversees the device during the E! network's red-carpet coverage, and the resulting dramatic slo-mo celebrity action clips are posted to TikTok and Instagram.