Liquid Time

After finishing the most recent IceScapes.tv episode I felt like doing a quick experimental project that wouldn't take weeks of work to complete. For a while I've been wanting to play with the combination of very short shutter speeds and slow-motion. The result is this ultra-short experimental film called Liquid Time.

The Canon 5d mkII allows you to film at 1/4000th of a second, at 30 frames per second. That means you can "freeze" very fast moving subjects in time. To enhance that effect I played around with the time remapping feature in Final Cut Pro, slowing down the footage to between 10% and 20% of it's normal speed, smoothly ramping up and down the speed.

In addition I wanted to try out the in-camera picture styles of the 5d to achieve a contrasty black and white effect. Normally you would do something like that in post production, so you can tweak it untill it's exactly the way you want it, but I wanted to see if I can shorten the workflow a little bit by achieving this effect inside the camera and having it already baked into the footage. In a way it's limiting oneself, but that can also be a good thing. It enables you to purely focus on the creative process without getting lost in endless post production. Also, because the camera display gives me immediate feedback of what the end result is going to look like, I might shoot the same thing differently than I would have done otherwise. With the high contrast black and white for example, you can sometimes achieve a cool effect by over- or underexposing a little, creating bright whites and deep blacks.