Hothouse 7: Moving Sky

The following is a guest post by Aimée van Drimmelen as part of the Hothouse Program.

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I finished shooting my under camera background sequences this week, holed up in a bedroom at the cabin while flocks of pelicans and other birds made their way up and down the valley.

There are three separate background sections to my film: A moving sky, a landscape, and what I’ve been calling the “Black Sequence.” They all involve manipulating ink and water on a drumskin. I’ll show you how the sky turned out today.

For my first test (see below), I was capturing an image every 0.5 seconds. We figured it was a bit too fast, choppy, and busy for a sky. It was suggested I use continuous rapid capture for a slo-mo effect. In the end I was able to shoot over 700 frames without pause, despite low lighting and shooting at the highest resolution. Unfortunately most of what I shot was unusable due to unwanted bubbles getting in the shot, or concentrations of colour that I didn’t like (its hard to control this stuff). But by overlapping a the few sections that did work, I’ve got more than enough footage to work with. I still have to iron out some issues with the transitions between sections, and anobvious flicker throughout the piece, but it’s quite an improvement.