Are time lapse shots of growing plants done in a studio or at the particular places on earth?
I recently watched the Planet Earth TV series. There are some beautiful shots in the different episodes! And one shot (or one particular type of shot) I'm curious about how they done it.
In the 8th episode "Jungles" (but in many other episodes of the series and also in other documentaries) are some 360 degree time lapse shots of growing plants and mushrooms. We can see a plants growing.
My question: are those (360 degrees) time lapse shots done in a studio or at the particular places on earth (i.e. where the plants are originally resident)? Because in a studio I think the shots are much more easier to accomplish. From my point of view I can't determine the fact where the plants are placed for the shots.
This youtube video is not taken from the Planet Earth tv series, but that are exactly the shots I'm talking about:
Best Answer
I don't know for sure, but I highly suspect those were created in a studio. There are 2 main reasons:
The lighting is consistent. In the real world, the sun moves across the sky and shadows follow it. Clouds make intermittent shadows. The intensity of light changes at different times of day - dawn, noon, sunset, night. (I suppose that the filmmakers COULD have shaded a whole section of the outdoors, and applied artificial lighting.)
If there was even a light breeze outdoors, the plants would have bent a little, and they would appear to shake and shudder in the time-lapse footage. The shots in this video show perfectly-still plants growing.
Also, as a filmmaker myself, I'd much rather have a controlled environment to shoot beautiful footage like this. Outdoors is really unpredictable! (Rain, fog, animals walking through, insects, bird poop landing on your subjects, etc.)
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Answer 2
This video explains the techniques used to create the time-lapse sequences of the BBC Life (2009) series. I'm not sure if the team was the same for the Planet Earth (2006) series, but imagine that the techniques shown (with refinements and technological updates) would be similar.
The (massively oversimplified) approach appears to be:-
- identify a suitable "real life" scene
- build a rig for a tracking shot
- survey the scene and the rig so that the two can be recreated in a studio
- record the tracking shot (as a background) frame by frame using a DSLR
- grow the plants that will be used in the final shot
- film each plant, as it flowers, in its appropriate position in the studio
- create a final sequence combining all of the individual layers
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