Mountains Aglow

I hope were all starting off to a great Monday!

It’s the morning of the 19th here on the West Coast of Vancouver. And we couldn’t be any more excited and proud to release our new timelapse film titled ‘Mountains Aglow‘. Welcome to the production blog discussing the film, please enjoy!

My original goal with the Mountains Aglow production was to mainly develop my skills and become better at astro-timelapse and the challenges it brings, all while being able to be up in the mountains for a weekend. When I got home from the first weekend of shooting, I saw the RAW clips and realized how well the shots were turning out so we decided to make what was going to be a few clips for stock footage, into a short film. I went up 2 more times, the first of which was with Daniel Gogolin and Paul Schellenberg but unfortunately the weather didn’t work in our favour, and then a third with my Dad who makes an appearance in the film towards to end.

The film takes place in Mt. Baker – Snoqualmie National Forest in the North Cascades of Washington. Other than the establishing shot at the beginning, all of the locations are in the National Forest Area. The central location I shot from is called Artist Point, which boasts 360 degree views of the surrounding area. From this point there are quite a few hikes you can do including to the top of Mt. Baker if you are experienced enough. So now that you have an idea of how the film came about, lets take a look. Enjoy!

The gear that I used for this film includes:

Canon 5d mark ii
Canon 16-35mm f/2.8
Canon 70-200 f/4

Dynamic Perception Click here to see their gear!
Acuter Merlin Telescope head “Merlin Mount”

During the last night of shooting this film, I had a big 3-axis move that was going to start looking straight up at a big tree, and push forward while panning left and tilting down which was going to reveal a couple of glaciers and a lake as the moon struck. This was the plan at least, but when I checked on the shot just before the moon rose, the Merlin Head had decided it was calling it quits and stopped working. Shot lost! So I figured its only 11pm might as well just set up a simple z axis across the stream leading towards the lake. This is when I noticed a slightly green horizon. So I quickly pulled out my iphone, opened up twitter and the first thing I see is @Aurora_Alerts predicting Storm Level Aurora in the next hour! I was so hyped! Once my camera hit the 300 photo mark I rushed to the top of a close by hill to get the second Aurora shot right up until the sunrise! So in a way I am kind of glad that the Merlin head failed on me otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed the Aurora behind me!

The post processing of this film was quite enjoyable as I have my workflow pretty much dialed out now. I generally start in ACR, (sometimes LRTimelapse) then create image sequences in After Effects before rendering out in Cineform 4k to Premiere Pro. When it was all said and done I took a total of 22,000 photos in 3 weekends. This is definitely record setting for me personally!

A big thank you goes to Aaron Miller for helping us out with Music once again, and what a fantastic job he did! Always a pleasure working with him, you can check out his website here, aaronmilleronline.com/. And another huge thanks to Dafna Vallejo for providing her skill in motion graphics for the title & credits, you can visit her website here, cargocollective.com/dafnavallejo.

So thank you all for reading and we hope you enjoyed the film. There is going to be plenty more to come and we look forward to seeing how the video does over the next couple weeks. Please let us know if you have any questions or thoughts in the comments, we would be happy to answer.