Tom Lowe has done it again: another jaw-dropping astronomy timelapse.
Timescapes: “Death is the Road to Awe” from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes on Vimeo.
Wow, that’s simply stunning. The music is beautiful and driving, too; it’s from "The Fountain", a movie I quite enjoyed.
My favorite was the cactus with the Pleiades, Orion, and Sirius behind it. But the whole thing is devastatingly beautiful. You should watch the other short films he’s made, too!
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The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking, movie reviews, and all that) can be found here.
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April 20th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
Awesome.
April 20th, 2010 at 3:10 pm
Hey Phil and friends… in case the music intrigues, here is a link to the entire piece of Youtube which has embedded links to itunes or Amazonmp3store so you can buy the track yourself. It’s about 9 minutes, so you can stick it behind today’s glorious shuttle landing for an added nerdy thrill. Weren’t our space girls awesome! Thanks Phil. We love you! –Jan
April 20th, 2010 at 3:24 pm
It’s amazing how the spell can be broken so easily by sticking a person dancing into the middle of it.
April 20th, 2010 at 4:29 pm
Yeah, what Al G. said.
I wish it had time-lapsed for a longer period of time, but I loved the music!
April 20th, 2010 at 4:41 pm
3. Al G.
So I guess you’ve never danced in ecstasy? You don’t know what you’ve missed.
Great imagery.
Tanks Phil.
GAry 7
April 20th, 2010 at 5:01 pm
I love how the rotation of the Earth becomes a noticeable thing when you see a night time lapse video.
April 20th, 2010 at 5:47 pm
So amazing!!! Gorgeous clip
Thanks Phil for sharing this
April 20th, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Really nice, but a quick question.
Why is the point of view ( camera) moving in relation to the ground?
I’ve seen quite a few timelapses, but not any that had the camera’s on moving platforms during the timelapse.
April 20th, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Frank,
As you mentioned, up until recently the majority of timelapse footage was shot with a locked off camera.
However Tom is using a small motion-control (computer driven) dolly system where the actual speed of the dolly appears incredibly slow if you were to watch it in operation. (eg. a 10 sec. timelapse dolly shot may take several hours to shoot.)
As he is shooting in timelapse mode, the movement is time-compensated and the final shot looks like a regular dolly move but with the scene action sped up as programmed.
April 20th, 2010 at 8:05 pm
He did a great job, but the cinematography is a blatant ripoff of… er, homage to director Ron Fricke.
For those of you who thought this was great, I highly highly highly recommend the movie BARAKA. You will be blown away to smithereens.
April 20th, 2010 at 8:12 pm
[...] 0 Comments | Posted by doctor paradox in Mad Science via blogs.discovermagazine.com [...]
April 20th, 2010 at 9:51 pm
You liked The Fountain? Seriously? A “let’s float off through space in the lotus position – a reference to Eastern religions, so we must be deep! – into a supernova, with special effects that remind me of nothing so much as the cheesy, cheap, early 1980s, spiraling clouds that the Grim Reaper leads the dinner party into at the end of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life” movie?
And it didn’t bother you at all that the “Xibalba Nebula”, which figures so prominently in the movie, is the Orion Nebula? Considering that, you know, they show as being gold and claim that it contains a dying star? Which, despite apparently being an isolated low-mass star creating a planetary nebula, ends up going supernova?
Hmm.
On the other hand, Jackman and Weisz were both very good. And the modern Earth sequences were well done.
April 20th, 2010 at 10:34 pm
This is incredible. All of these shots are beautifully composed.
@#5 I’ve never danced in ecstasy either. I’ve danced ON ecstasy…but that’s something else entirely
April 20th, 2010 at 10:38 pm
Beautiful.
April 21st, 2010 at 4:15 am
Loved “The Fountain” thought it was beautiful and awe-inspiring.
I also thought the special effects were interesting because they were made without CG mainly from macro photography with chemical reactions in a Petri dish! Watch “The Future” in the extras section.
April 21st, 2010 at 5:09 am
-Yeah The Fountain was flaky, but I really liked it. I thought the segment in the special features that shows how Hugh Jackman’s character in the bubble creates food could be one of the best short films ev-er.
-Al G: so true.
-Phil: love the Pleiades, down here in the land of the Southern Cross they call it ‘Matariki’ and its appearance marks the beginning of the Maori New Year.
April 21st, 2010 at 6:17 am
I’m also a bit ambivalent about the dancer. It seemed like an artificial (and cliched) attempt to raise the spirituality content of the video, as if the film-maker didn’t really have enough confidence in the power of his primary material.
April 21st, 2010 at 8:52 am
Reminds me of the playstation network game “Flower.” Probably because of the windmills.
You would like it, Phil. You a gamer?
April 21st, 2010 at 10:09 am
13. DownHouse
LOL!
17. csrster
Spirituality is just another way of saying “Feeling good was good enough for me and Bobby McGee” (Thank you Janis).
Who says rationalists don’t have poetry in their souls(hearts, minds, whatever)?
Looking forward to more like these.
GAry 7
April 21st, 2010 at 11:56 am
[...] Source:http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/04/20/gorgeous-nightscape-timelapse/ Tags: astronomy, cinema camera, death is the road to awe, mx, nightscape, tom lowe [...]
April 21st, 2010 at 2:19 pm
I didn’t mind the dancer but there was a tree in motion (and only the tree) in the landscape during the first 15 seconds or so. I still can’t figure out what was going on there and now am wondering where it was off to.
April 21st, 2010 at 2:26 pm
[...] Source:http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/04/20/gorgeous-nightscape-timelapse/ [...]
April 21st, 2010 at 2:31 pm
I loved the Fountain. “Finish it”.
April 21st, 2010 at 4:53 pm
[...] it’s beautiful. We loved particularly loved the cactus shot, but didn’t quite know why. Discover’s Phil Plait helps us out: in the sky behind the cactus are the Pleiades, Orion, and [...]
April 21st, 2010 at 11:43 pm
10. RawheaD Says: ” He did a great job, but the cinematography is a blatant ripoff of… er, homage to director Ron Fricke.”
If you’re referring to “Koyaanisqatsi,” the director was Godfrey Reggio. Fricke was the cinematographer.
- Jack
April 22nd, 2010 at 2:56 am
Where in the southwest, ( I presume ) are those incredibly twisty turny striated rocks?
April 22nd, 2010 at 5:05 am
In reference to 12. Charon, my brother who is a big movie buff had to concede that it did not contain the gritty realism of “True Lies”
April 22nd, 2010 at 9:55 am
[...] Geeft een erg leuk effect, vooral met die cactussen in de woestijn. Kijken en luisteren dus! Bron: Bad Astronomy. Gerelateerde Astroblog:Video Timelapse, in één woord: WOW! Tags: timelapse, video | Categorie: [...]
April 22nd, 2010 at 5:04 pm
[...] Shared Gorgeous nightscape timelapse | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine. [...]
April 25th, 2010 at 4:10 am
[...] Ein tolles nächtliches Zeitraffervideo (via Bad Astronomy) [...]
May 3rd, 2010 at 1:12 am
Hey, please give me a link to this music on itunes. Amazing video. Thanks.
November 1st, 2010 at 1:33 pm
[...] across the sky, it’s awesome to behold. Tom is the real thing. You should also check out his “Death Is the Road to Awe”, a similar timelapse [...]
January 1st, 2011 at 8:53 pm
[...] to anyone but me, but photography has universal appeal. One thing I thought spectacular was this Timescape Video. When I retire, I plan to get heavily into photography, and this is one of the things I want to [...]