Working on Tiny World was my first real opportunity to step into a fully dedicated studio environment, assisting the great time-lapse specialist Richard Kirby as he filmed a range of tropical plant sequences.

 

The main sequence we were working towards was a forest regeneration story, following plants taking advantage of a recently fallen tree and racing for the light, ultimately won by a Brazil nut tree. I was also tasked with capturing a couple of orchid flowering timelapses for the islands episode.

 

The studio itself was built at Aardman Animations, and it was on a scale far beyond anything I had worked in before. A huge controlled environment designed to replicate tropical conditions, with temperature, humidity and lighting all carefully managed. We were filming in the middle of winter, so going from freezing outdoor conditions to a sweltering tropical studio became a daily routine.

 

We were typically running three to four setups at once, and I spent much of my time operating motion control rigs and learning to use Dragonframe for programming camera moves. It was my first introduction to that level of precision, being able to design and execute moves exactly as intended.

 

It was an incredibly formative experience, and a big influence on how I went on to design and build my own timelapse systems.