art – steve hickey

Recently I was asked to make a time-lapse video during the creation of Susan Stockwell’s art installation at Hall Place, Bexley.

The installation – Trade Winds – would be made from thousands of coins on which would ‘float’ small ships made with paper money from around the world. I was aware that the installation could take up most of the floor space in the room which was about 8 x 10 metres so the first thing to sort out was where to put the camera. A tripod wasn’t an option as the chances of it being moved by accident were high but luckily there was a small lighting rail on the ceiling which I could use to hang a lightweight camera. I mounted the GX8 with a small clamp – backed up with Gaffa tape and a safety chain just in case the clamp and tape didn’t hold.

I used a 7.5mm Samyang Lens to cover the whole floor with the intention of cropping into the frame for the best coverage of Susan’s work.

The camera has a very good built-in intervalometer which is very easy to set up to shoot a series of images. I shot RAW still frames and didn’t use the in camera conversion to movie (quite frankly the conversion in camera is not very good). I processed the RAW frames in Capture One so I could output as jpegs which were then imported into Premiere Pro. I could then crop the full frame images as necessary to the 16:9 format.

The Panasonic GX8 hanging upside down from the lighting rail.

It all worked pretty well and was used as both a standalone time-lapse and also as part of a longer video about the installation.

The only real issue I had was with the battery life which lasted about 180 minutes, maybe a little more. Shooting about 3 frames a minute gave me around 600 frames or so depending on which battery was used. The installation progressed over 5 days so I would be away for much of the time, going in when I could to change batteries. Sometimes the battery died before I could get in to replace it so there are a couple of points where the time-lapse moves on slightly quicker than it should but overall I think it works.

Susan Stockwell’s work can be seen on Su’s website.

I meant to write this a couple of months ago but it’s been a busy time in various ways and I’ve only now got around to it.

Anyway I spent 13 days over 3 weeks this summer shooting a short film of Laura Ellen Bacon working at Hall Place, a Tudor House situated about a 15 minute walk from where I live in Bexley. Art exhibitions are a central theme of Hall Place and visitors almost always have the chance to view an exhibition when visiting the house and gardens. Laura’s work was part of the Watershed exhibition, Laura was also the first Artist in Residence at Hall Place and I had the opportunity to film her at work.

Laura works with willow and makes large structures which are often placed out in the open, as was the case here. The weather played its part, starting reasonably well the first day or two but after that most days it seemed to rain – quite heavily sometimes. Pretty much your typical English summer. I think there were one or two sunny days somewhere in there, but Laura carries on working whatever the weather! So I had to rainproof the cameras a lot of the time. I was filming with a Canon XF100 and 2 Canon 5Ds. I had proper waterproof covers for the 5Ds but the XF100 had to make do with a cut down plastic bag – but then I do tend to improvise a lot with things like that so it wasn’t a problem.

As I live close by I could pop over for an hour or so, have a chat with Laura about how the work might progress through the day then maybe go back later for another hour or two. I felt it was important not to get in Laura’s way too much and allow her to work so I didn’t hang around any longer than necessary. So with a couple of weekend breaks this is how it went over 3 weeks. It was a great experience to be able to be there on pretty much a daily basis and watch Laura at work and to see the sculpture take shape.

Laura was assisted by her partner Robert Clough and both were a pleasure to work with, particularly as they shared their Rocky Road cake with me!

The video can be seen at http://www.vimeo.com/141776115

Tag: art

Time-lapse with the Panasonic GX8

Filming Laura Ellen Bacon