Thanks everyone for the kind words. As you can imagine, I've put a huge amount of time and passion into this stuff, but I will say that it is the most fun I have ever had on a project in my lifetime. I remember many months ago looking through my lens and imagining that sun popping up over the horizon on a coral landscape...and it's just surreal to me to see it working now...
Can you please share some equipment specs with us?
Everything was built from scratch and put together based on information I found online. To just do the static shots, all that is needed is a camera and an intervalometer (a little box that plugs into your camera and automates flipping the shutter on a timer).
To do the truck/dolly shots I use a linear stage that I mounted on my tripod with some wood blocks. It's a precision instrument for factory robots that...moves linearly and can be controlled via a driver. The stage is extremely precise which really comes in handy when you want to move the camera slowly at 5x.
Check out my videos on vimeo to see what that stuff looks like.
The sun is mounted on Sherline Rotary table which is just like the linear stage only it rotates instead of moving linearly. It sit's outside my aquarium and I put a mirror behind my coral to put the sun behind the coral.
All of this is controlled by an Arduino USB board which requires some basic electronics knowledge to put together and simple C coding to use. The Arduino is connected to two stepper motor drivers (for the stage/rotary table) and a basic intervalometer circuit ($2 worth of electronics) so that I can interleave shots/movement.
do you have any similar videos that we can see that you aren't submitting for a film festival?
I do have a demo reel that I want to put online - but I don't have the rights to use the close encounters soundtrack so I have a musician friend messing around with trying to score it himself. It was actually finished months ago (prior to any sun/linear stage) and uses my old camera (Canon Xsi) + the 100 mm. I think it's a bit more exciting, while for "Montipora" I just wanted to show beautiful/alien this world is. It shows off pretty much all the major types of coral, many of which have much more interesting type behavior (baby's breath eating, acans tug-of-war'ing over food, whole colonies of zoa's opening up, etc...). I'll post it up if and my friend finishes putting it to music.
-Tre
