"Earth laughs in flowers" - Emerson
August 5, 2012 6:21 AM Subscribe
The Life of Flowers is a timelapse of blooms opening put to music. It's simple and lovely.
Back when I was in high school, I did an independent study program based on animation, and at the end of the year, I was supposed to present my results in a talk. I borrowed an 8mm camera from the AV department, and it had an intervalometer built in that allowed it to take a single frame every 60 seconds. It also allowed me to hook a flash camera up to it so I didn't need to bother with hot lights. So I decided that one of my films would be the time-lapse capture of a rose going from bud to blossom. I went to the grocery store, and bought some cheap yellow roses, that included a bud, and I set the bunch in a vase, put the camera on a tripod, and set it all up in the front room of the apartment my mom and I were living in at the time.
Four days went by and every sixty seconds, day and night, the front room of flashed in brilliance. My friends would drive by and see the light flash. The rosebud stayed obstinately closed. Since it was January, I decided that the problem must have something to do with the ambient temperature, so I turned up the heat in the apartment to 80 degrees. Still nothing.
Finally, on the 5th day, the rosebud opened up but didn't turn into a picturesque stereotypical rose. For reasons I still don't understand, it opened, and dropped all of it's petals within an hour or two. On the film, the results were basically a static shot of a rosebud for about four and a half minutes, and then in two seconds, the bud explodes.
I moved on to other stop motion experiments after that.
posted by crunchland at 9:25 AM on August 5, 2012 [3 favorites]
Four days went by and every sixty seconds, day and night, the front room of flashed in brilliance. My friends would drive by and see the light flash. The rosebud stayed obstinately closed. Since it was January, I decided that the problem must have something to do with the ambient temperature, so I turned up the heat in the apartment to 80 degrees. Still nothing.
Finally, on the 5th day, the rosebud opened up but didn't turn into a picturesque stereotypical rose. For reasons I still don't understand, it opened, and dropped all of it's petals within an hour or two. On the film, the results were basically a static shot of a rosebud for about four and a half minutes, and then in two seconds, the bud explodes.
I moved on to other stop motion experiments after that.
posted by crunchland at 9:25 AM on August 5, 2012 [3 favorites]
The video's working here today. Unfortunately, it felt like it cut away to the next flower too soon every time. :-/
If you can't view the video where you are, you could try these links from the youtube description: high quality video vimeo version, though I didn't try either link myself.
posted by jepler at 7:15 AM on August 6, 2012
If you can't view the video where you are, you could try these links from the youtube description: high quality video vimeo version, though I didn't try either link myself.
posted by jepler at 7:15 AM on August 6, 2012
« Older Every Radio Has Them | I am a lego on the wind. Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by Jody Tresidder at 7:53 AM on August 5, 2012