Video clip of the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) from Iceland. Watch soon for the full short film ‘3 Days in Iceland’.
Earlier this year I went on a trip to Paris that included a jaunt over to Iceland. It was an exercise in extremes. And it was an amazing, highly photogenic experience.
The goal was to capture enough footage to produce two parts of my upcoming 3 DAYS trilogies. 3 Days in Paris. 3 Days in Iceland. That was the idea at least.
I’m now realizing what filmmaker Werner Herzog meant when he said, in his online masterclass, that “we are not garbage collectors!”
Indeed, I probably recorded too much stuff (I have a tendency to always be recording). The upside is I have lots of shots to choose from when editing. But that comes at a cost. It means I need to spend hours upon hours going through it all, tagging the stuff I like, and organizing shot lists. It’s not the funnest thing ever. Then again, video editing requires a certain amount of drudgery from time to time, just like any other job. I keep reminding myself, after several shots of espresso, that as soon as I can get the technical tasks out of the way I can enjoy the creative aspects of the editing process — structure, music, sound design, color, etc.
Gear-wise I wanted to travel light, but still capture decent images.
So I went with a little Sony Alpha a6500 mirrorless camera and the flexible and reasonably priced Sony 18-110mm f/4 G telephoto lens which afforded lots of opportunity for capturing wide landscapes, or zooming in tight for close-ups. It did perform well. I was surprised, though, that the a6500 overheated… in the middle of the freezing tundra, during a rainstorm, somewhere deep in Southern Iceland (!). I loved the stills it took. For video, now that I’ve spent time with the new Panasonic GH5 there’s no going back. GH5 all the way.
So I’m sitting on almost 1 TB of video from Paris and Iceland.
And about 4 years of footage from Sonoma, another project I’m working on concurrently.
Suffice to say, I’m learning the value of pre-planning. Shot lists. Storyboards. These things make life so much easier, not only on location, but also later during the editing process — you’ll already have a good idea of how the pieces will come together to tell a story.
With that, here’s a short clip below of the Aurora Borealis somewhere in Iceland. What a beautiful country, with such friendly people. The visit reminded me of my home country of Canada.
Stay tuned, I’ll be releasing the 3 DAYS series soon… I hope. Either that or someone’s going to find me lying underneath my RAIDs, quivering, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew! What have I done! This is the water, and this is the well…
AURORA BOREALIS EXPLAINED
The Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) and Aurora Australis (Southern Lights) are the result of electrons colliding with the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. (Protons cause faint and diffuse aurora, usually not easily visible to the human eye.)
Source: Space Weather Prediction Center
WATCH: 3 DAYS IN ICELAND // Aurora Borealis
A clip from a short film by Clint Stark. Featuring Loni Stark. Coming soon to Stark Insider.
3 DAYS IN ICELAND: Aurora Borealis from Stark Insider on Vimeo.
