Picture Stories by Stephen Alvarez: Video and Still convergence: seeing The Light

April 24, 2012

Video and Still convergence: seeing The Light

Those of you who follow me on facebook know I have been working on a convergent film project. Now convergence is a word I throw out pretty often. By it I mean a place where the film and still photography worlds merge. This film is a perfect example. Not only is it made up entirely of still images -I'll get to that in a second- but it is really a landscape photo essay except the pictures move in a surprising way. Our concept was to take 24 hours on the campus of The University of the South and distill it to one 3 minute ideal day. Beside vimeo the film resides here where you can download still as screen savers.

The entire film is time lapse photography. Over the course of 2 months I shot 27,500 photographs (722 Gigs!) and blended 5,000 of them into this film. Time laspe is fun, often frustrating and takes a degree of obsessiveness that I usually reserve for my work at National Geographic Magazine. How obsessive is that? Take a look at this video of me on the 5th day of trying to make scene 5 work.

There is nothing new about time lapse technique, people have been under cranking since film began. The big change is in delivery. Even 5 years ago it would have been hard to get this film distributed but now with sites like vimeo, youtube and facebook distribution is practically free and entirely governed by the film's popularity. How popular will it be? Only time will tell.

Stephen Alvarez

Sewanee, TN