The artwork is titled “The rent is too damn high” and features a begging owl with droopy, drug induced eyes (prescribed pain killers). The inspiration for this creature came as a result of Never being in so much suffering due to his knee surgery along with his recent apartment hunting in NYC where he will be relocating later this month. Watch the video…
“I have explored the idea of shooting time-lapse with a long time friend and talented artist who operates under the alias of Never (aka Never Satisfied) in Atlanta, Georgia. Never has been out of commission recently due to knee surgery followed by a nasty staph infection. While only partially recovered, he agreed to shoot for the time-lapse challenge.”
To complete the challenge, I built a team consisting of my business partner and co-founder @ UpThink, Erik Huber, along with fellow photographer Jeremy Stephenson. Michael Wynne generously volunteered his time to create an original piece of music for the project. Once we had the man power, all we needed was a safe location to capture Never. We picked a location in NW Atlanta at an abandoned warehouse that’s far off the grid. This spot has been a favorite of mine in recent years due to mysterious tire dumpers filling the space. It’s an environmental disappointment to know that all this rubber is being dumped by someone and I personally do not condone those activities. However, the vast sea of tires offered us a unique visual perspective for this project. To help portray the passing time during the day via visible light beams, we hiked into the location with a 1k generator and hazer. The visible light created by the hazer combined with the constantly changing wind flow through the space really brought the location to life. We shot bracketed RAW exposures, but steered away from using any HDRs in the final video in an effort to not get caught up in the overly tone-mapped trend amongst photographers these days. The bracketed exposures allowed us more freedom in post to create some variation within the edit. We shot with longer exposures (4-13 seconds) to emphasize the movement with motion blur. This side-project was a lot of fun for everyone involved. We did have a few technical issues during the shoot– such as getting our gas can (full of gas) stolen, the generator flooded mid-shoot, the 12v battery used with the Dynamic Perception dolly rig failed, and we ran out of light just as the artwork was being finished. Despite the minimal complications, we managed to finish the 45 second edit* and get it posted. – Doug Urquhart
Produced by The UpThink Lab for the 2011 Gizmodo Time-lapse Video Challenge
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