“When I first heard Cascades isolated from the rest of the album (Field Drawings), winter was very much in the air and the sharp, twinkling notes called to mind at once falling snow, but also a memory from my childhood of a broken jewellery box that belonged to my grandma. The partnerless ballerina in the centre of the box would rotate tremulously to a sparse and lonely clockwork soundtrack that echoed through the over-wound springs in the base.”

 

This is the idea Craig Ward came across listening for the first time to Ryan Teague’s Cascade, and everything is beautiful. He heard about Linden Gledhill, a very smart and clever biochemist (and photographer), who found a particular way for getting photos of incredibly small-sized subjects, and he told him about the idea of shooting the growing of ice structure for a timelapse videoclip. Gledhill accepted the challenge and, in a couple weeks, he achieved the so called snowmaker machine, powered with a 2000 volts potential difference, which can infuence the shapes of water’s crystalline forms (just because water is a conductive medium).

 

The shooting is impressive and they used two cameras. A Hasselblad with two lenses, a macro and a magnifier, is involved within the most of the images, a Canon 5D is used for the tubular rotating structure (you can see it on minute 1:20): a photo was taken every 30 seconds during 7 hours (a night) the time for the structure to perform just two rotations. Incredibly slooooooooooooooooow. The growing of the ice was controlled with electricity and was kept in particular temperature conditions: just a degree variation could compromize the whole formation, which should grow as long as gravity allows it: after that the ice collapses, changing his shape and extension.

 

Four months of planning and four days of continuously shooting to generate 7 minutes of footage, in two terabytes of memory. Every image taken was 9000px in size and represents a just 3cm wide area: the video editing did consist in choosing interesting portions of frames, which present good ice formation, using each sequence in different ways, following the random crystal growth.

 

The result of the video is just amazing, and the atmosphere is fascinating. For people it’s a pleasure to spend time observing the shape of ice branches, but photography experts also found interesting and innovative the technical part of the experiment.

Here it is a sneak peek of the  behind the scenes.

Ryan Teague – Cascades

Artist: Ryan Teague
Direction:
Craig Ward
Released:
June 2012
Production:
Craig Ward
Techniques:
very macro timelapse, using a Canon 5D and a Hasselblad with macro and magnifier lenses
What's Cool:
dancing ice structures, looking like microscopic trees
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November 15th, 2012


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