I'd had the idea for this short film in my head for about one year before I started filming for it around November 2016. I was constantly talking to my wife about the ideas for the shots I wanted to get and how I thought I could film it. Little did my wife know, at that point that I was going to put her in front of the camera! I shot the film at weekends and occasional nights, after gaining permission from the correct authorities, especially for the longer timelapse shoots. Thanks to a good friend for his assistance - you know who you are!
I wanted to weave some slow motion shots together with timelapse work and see what the results would be and at the same time tell a short story of a city born from the desert, hence the name of the film 'Rise Desert Rose', the desert rose name coming from mineral formations found deep in Qatar's desert, called 'desert roses' which also has inspired the design of Qatar's new National Museum, due to open soon. Thankfully, my wife was up for the challenge of being in front of the camera for the video elements, despite already being pregnant at the beginning of the shoot! By the time we filmed the 4th shot in the film (in the windy desert by the Richard Serra sculptures), she was already 4 months pregnant. It was extremely cold in the desert, very windy and filming conditions made it hard to setup the slider on the tripods, to get focus and to keep my wife warm with frequent breaks in the car! For those opening scenes with the pink outfit, I did double exposures using the Kessler Second Shooter and Cineslider – this made it easy to perform repeatable moves, but even this robust piece of kit was taking a hammering from the extreme wind that day and some stabilisation was required in post, this was mainly due to the heavy 100mm Zeiss catching the wind with 10 stops of ND acting as a 'kite'.
We bought 3 outfuts from Souk Waqif here in Doha to use in the film. One pink, one green and one blue. My original idea was to use pink for the desert shots, green for the areas in Qatar with nature and trees and blue for the ocean. Time, the weather (and the growing baby) meant we had to drop some of those ideas – but we still have them on the 'backburner' if needed.
The video for the film was shot on the Sony A7SII at 50fps in picture profile 8 (PP8) set to default, with the changed the gamut from SLOG3 to CINE4 – the reason for this was the ability to shoot with a flat picture profile and at a base ISO of 200 rather than the much higher ISO requirements of the S-LOG profiles. I knew I wanted to shoot the video wide open, and even at ISO 200.
All of the timelapses were shot as 8K stills using the full sensor area of 2 x Sony A7RII cameras using a range of Sony and other brand lenses with adapters. I shot in compressed raw rather than uncompressed raw simply due to the file sizes and management in post (and also due to the fact I would be working on my ageing 4 year old MacBook Pro). In total, I shot about 2 terabytes of still images and about 1 terabyte of video. I rendered the timelapses out as UHD rather than 8K or 'true4K' due to its 16:9 aspect ratio. This was done due to the fact the video, being shot at 50fps and at 1920x1080 was going to be my working resolution and final output, i.e. downscaling the UHD rather then upscaling the HD to fit a UHD raster, I did look at upscaling the HD to fit UHD and it looked good, but not as good as I wanted. The timelapses sit on a hard drive in UHD, and in total I shot about 50 timelapse sequences and about 43 of them made it into the edit. There were some more shots I wanted to get, but the increasing heat in Qatar at this time of year (beginning of June) has forced me to stop, but I'll be back to shooting timelapse again outdoors when conditions are right. Over 75% of the hyperlapses were shot handheld – this was one massive advantage of using the Sony A7RII's; their small form factor made taking 600 frames by hand, reframing each shot by eye much easier than using heavier DSLR's.
None of this puzzle-piecing could be done without a great soundtrack. So, I contacted my friend and composer, Athar Saeed, who I had collaborated with before on some of my previous timelapse films and he was more than happy to work together again. I dropboxed Athar one still frame from each of the timelapes, in no particular order and let his imagination run wild. A few emails, calls and several listens later, we were both happy with the final track, which I am sure you will agree is an amazing score. The most incredible thing is that he pulled this off in a day or two. This man can compose and produce at the speed of light! Check out some more of his work right here: http://ift.tt/2qHPVtN
This film would not have been possible without the kind assistance of:
-Marriott Marquis Hotel, West Bay
-Shangri La Hotel, West Bay
-Rotana Hotel, City Centre
-The Pearl & UDC
-Qatar Science and Technology Park
-Museum of Islamic Art
Cast: Richard Bentley and Athar Saeed Music - Sound Design
Tags: timelapse, doha, slowmotion, sony, sony a7rii. sony a7sii, zeiss, canon, time-lapse, desert, cities, city, arabian, sand, dunes, kessler, benro, gitzo and second shooter
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