Currently, Field’s robot Otto is on a farm in Devon belonging to Tim Shepherd, a quiet, precision enthusiast who pioneered the shortening of time. Plant’s private life five years ago. He’s oddly paired up with Chris Field, whose arms are covered with carnivorous plant tattoos, but the two of them set out to help Gunton achieve a short that begins as a premonition.
“We want to cover plants in Planet earth so we went to Kew Gardens full of things that we wanted to photograph plants like ‘fight,’ ‘think,’ ‘count,’ all the animal words and they’re all inverted commas,” “They say, great, but you can get rid of all those inverted commas. Plants do all of that, just in a different timeframe. That’s our mantra,” says Gunton. give Green Planet—The only difference between plants and animals is that they move in a different time frame. ”
To capture this, they are pushing technology from simple to surreal. Williams found a microscope in California that can film stomata 10 microns wide — minute openings in leaves and stems that allow carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor to diffuse into and out of plant tissues. , collapsible to illustrate photosynthesis. And then there are drones.
The unit pioneered the use of drones in filming, deploying them in 2011 Earthflight, a good year before the first movie, 2012 Skyfall, using them to shoot James Bond in a motorcycle chase on the rooftop of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. For some Green Planet However, drones are banned due to local air traffic regulations, so Williams adapted a window cleaning pole into a lightweight expandable boom known as the Emu with the body of the vehicle. a broken drone at the end and a drone camera hanging below.
The real challenge of drones for Green PlanetGunton said, is hacking people, not technology. “We used an FPV drone, a racing drone, with a forward facing camera,” he explains. “Pilots are like computer players and have these extraordinary strike courses where they have to fly crazy acrobatics. What we want them to do is use all that amazing ingenuity to be able to operate those drones in a super micro-detailed way, but take your foot off the gas pedal. . “
The result is footage that appears to resemble the sweeping drone footage from any big-budget movie or TV show, showing events that take hours flying at seemingly normal speeds. However, for things that are really “red in teeth and nails”, a time-lapse camera is the only option. Williams, Field, and the unit’s engineers started off on hacking the robot Otto, eventually creating Triffid, using the same technology Field created that attached to an expandable ladder called a slider . When fully extended, the Triffid is 2.1 meters tall, but can quickly swoop down to the ground. Then Williams spent more time on kickstarter sites and came across a 24mm probe lens – thin enough to go into an insect-sized hole.
