Sunrise

A lot of times the doing can be just as fulfilling as the end result. When this is true it can be great because it allows you to enjoy the smaller stages of a project's development, even if it all goes wrong.

This time-lapse video of the rising sun didn't go completely wrong, but didn't go exactly to plan.

Before we even chose a location Jody and I were well aware that the making of this video could be quite fun. Our intention was to record the rising sun in a time-lapse video somewhere in the town we grew up in. We chose December so that we could get out of bed later and so one very chilly morning we got up around 6.45am, made a thermos-flask of coffee and with scarf and gloves, set off with our extensive amount of prepacked photography equipment (a point and shoot and a tripod).

We walked about a mile and a half out of town to the top of a hill that looks back down on where we came from. As we approached the top of the hill we realised that we could have left a bit earlier to get more of the sunrise, turns out the official time of sunrise on bbc.co.uk is the time when you can actually see the sun pop up over the horizon. Still, it was dark enough so we set up the tripod facing east back down into the valley and began taking pictures at what felt like regular intervals (at around 4 seconds) whilst trying not to kick the tripod.

The first problem (and only real problem) was that in December, the sun does not rise in the east. It rises in the south east(ish). Jody pointed this out after we had been taking pictures for about twenty minutes (we planned to take pictures for two hours in all) while the sun was yet to make an appearance, but we (I) felt too invested in the easterly direction and besides, the south east direction was a boring motorway. Jody turned out to be right and the sun rose in the most spectacular fashion (just out of shot) that it would have made the motorway look like the most exciting motorway you'd have ever seen.

Unfortunately this was before I had realised that a time-lapse video doesn't have to be a long single shot. I perhaps felt like cutting between shots was not doing justice to the presentation of manipulated time. It probably would have looked pretty cool cutting from the awakening town in the valley to the amazing sun appearing over the brow of the motorway with the streaking traffic and migrating flare. Determined to get some kind of video out of the expedition, we soldiered on, clicking until our hands were too cold to take any more pictures and the sun was in the sky (to our right).

This video I have described is not the video above. Once we lined up all the pictures it was a rather unfair portrayal of the majestic sunrise we had witnessed, so we decided to have another attempt in a different spot of the same town. We found a bridge going from a car park to a shopping centre, over looking a busy round about (indeed, a magic round about) and facing the direction that the sun was due to rise in. As before, we set off early with our stuff and began shooting. After about forty-five minutes some pencil pushing security guard came over to escort us off the premises! We didn't bother arguing or unleashing any judo chops, we just quickly chose another spot close by and carried on.

At the time we were quite bummed out about having to move in the middle of the video, but carried on anyway, this being our second attempt and all. As it turned out, the scene change in the middle went some way toward not making this a really boring video. Although the sun did rise (it rises everyday - in the south of the UK (that rhymes)), it was barely noticeable and not very exciting. Still, for the sake of doing, we finished it all off, recorded some sombre guitar and went with some words from a poem I wrote about how sad you can feel when you get out of bed late and miss the day:

How it pains the collection
To dream unhindered the night's rejection