“Every beginning comes from another beginning’s end”

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Personal Project video

This is the first personal project that I’ve been able to work on since my “Pictures of Mountains video” which was a few years ago. After completing this one, I’ve decided that I need to focus more time on these types of videos!

My goal for this video was to compile together a series of shots from the start of Fall throughout its peak, with an emphasis of time lapse photography. I love time lapse photography and it has been a while since I had just made that a priority

The making of a story

At the beginning of each project, I am focused mainly on capturing and compiling footage so I have a library of clips to choose from when it gets to the editing stage. Shortly after that stage begins is the perfect time for me to begin searching for ideas on what music I should get for my video. I have a few different sources I pay for when it comes to licensing music, and I spend hours streaming through their play lists. Since I was focused on shooting time-lapse videos about Autumn, the obvious theme for my video was something to do with time and seasons. With that in mind, I quickly found two songs I felt would work perfectly, so I licensed those and even worked out a way to seamlessly transition them together in my video editor. I also ran across this quote from Seneca so it seemed like everything was starting to “fall” into place just perfectly. However, a series of events and ideas would lead me to scrapping that whole project and let the new begin.

Discovering the “hero/heroine” of the video

One morning shortly after Labor Day I was hiking in the foothills below the Wellsville Mountain Wilderness Area which is literally 2 blocks away from my house. I knew of a little open area nearby that I could quickly get to, so I set out to get a time-lapse video of the incoming clouds from an approaching storm. I was walking on an old dirt road that had thick bushes on both sides which were about as tall as I am. There were trees off to one side of the road, but they were set back at least 30-40 feet away, and there were no branches nearby that extended above the trail. As I got to the last little climb, I stumbled across a leaf that was just dangling in the air above the pathway about the same height as my eyes. Without even thinking about it I went to swat the leaf out of my way but at the last second, I became curious as to its precarious predicament. It was hung up by a single spiderweb strand, but what really intrigued me was that there was no apparent anchor that the other end of the spiderweb was attached to. I walked completely around the leaf figuring the spiderweb must be spanning the bushes that lined the road and I would end up breaking the spiderweb, but the leaf stood strong. I walked around it again with my arm held straight up above me, but even that did not affect the leaf. I got close to the dangling leaf and could see that the spiderweb was going straight up, but the strand quickly vanished literally into thin air. I thought that was a pretty cool scene, so I quickly shot a video and left it dangling as it was. Later that day I went back to get an evening time-lapse of that area as the storm had cleared up. I anticipated that I’d get to that spot and the leaf would be scattered somewhere on the ground amongst its other friends. As I crested the hill, I was surprised to see that my friend did not give up, it did not give in, and it was still effortlessly blowing in the breeze! I shot another quick video again from a different angle and a little bit closer and went on to shoot the time-lapse which was my main purpose for being up there.

The decision to start over

Fast forward a few weeks after filming my little magical leaf and I find myself unable to get it out of my head, which in turn sparks an idea that I want to add to the video. The idea was to get many individual leaves to magically float throughout the video as well. The first, and obvious hurdle to overcome was that I did not have a spider that was trained to spin a single strand and attach it to thin air. I was able to figure out though that I can achieve this by creating a miniature set that looked like the forest floor, and then set the camera several feet above this set shooting straight down. These would have to be still images, but I was OK with that decision. After creating the mini set and coming up with a method to place and hold a single leaf about 2 feet above that, I then used two video lights to light the scene. One was lighting just the “floor” beneath the leaf, and the second was a warmer colored light that was flagged to only light the individual leaves. In total, I shot over 150 individual leaves for this video, and I tried to find as many different varieties as possible that I could find. The second hurdle I ran into was that my idea of all the floating leaves didn’t seem to work with either of the songs I had intended to use. By pure chance I was watching a video on YouTube from a channel that I subscribe to, and they were playing a song I’ve heard many times that I really like. I knew this was a song I could license through one of my music sources, so I went to that website and located the song. As I was reading through the lyrics, it was talking about not giving up and not giving in which instantly reminded me of my magical leaf that refused to fall to the ground.

Let the new begin

The second time creating this video I had much more thought about what I was making, and an analogy popped into my head as well as a story. Mother Nature marches to the beat of her own four seasons that includes Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. These seasons basically form a cycle which repeat over and over creating a 4/4 time signature. That cadence is mostly the same although there are moments between the transitions of seasons where it feels like the intensity and speed are ramped up. The song I chose, as well as the way I edited in the individual video and JPEG clips, also move along to a 4/4-time signature. The tempo stays the same, but everything intensifies and crescendos to the Grand Finale at the end of the video. The story is about accepting the past, starting over again, and letting the new begin. It's also a story of that one magical leaf that refused to accept the inevitable and attempts to find a way to opt out.

Conclusion

This year Autumn in Cache Valley started very slowly much like the way I started the video. There were a few storms that brought some very dynamic skies and a hint of cooler temperatures to come. Just after Labor Day the colors were beginning to gradually appear, and it was clear that we were officially in Autumn. Things really intensified during the next few weeks as we approached the time when Mother Nature was showing off her most vibrant colors. In my video there’s also an increase of intensity as the drum beat in the song becomes more pronounced and I shorten up the length of each video clip. Also in my video, this is where I had my encounter with the little magical leaf that refused to give up, and refused to give in (just like the lyrics in the song) and suspended itself from reality. ,

After that, Mother Nature finally reached her Autumn Grand Finale, and it was a spectacular sight again this year. Every day you could visually notice changes to the various groups of foliage, and there was no slowing it down. It seemed that the leaves hung around much longer than normal to provide their own Grand Finale at the end. In the video I matched the pace of each clip to the drum beats as they transition from whole and half notes to much more pronounced eighth notes and then sixteenth notes. As I dropped each clip into place, there was an immediate need for the next clip, and there was no slowing that down either. It was an exhausting edit at the very end with a machine gun-like pace, which I hoped could match Mother Nature’s final run!

So, what ever happened to that “magical” leaf? The first time I saw it, my first reaction was to simply swat it away from my path without a thought. It seemed to defy all logic and appeared to be extremely fragile, and I felt good to leave it there in that precarious state. The second time I went up there was after several hours of wind and rain. I was a hundred percent certain then that there was no way it could have made it through a storm. I was shocked to see that not only did it make it through, but it appeared to be dancing away in joy without a care in the world. It seemed survived an impossible situation and that there wasn’t anything that could bring it down. In the end, I never went back up to check on that magical little leaf, and I feel that is the best ending to this story!

Without further ado, here is the link to my video! Please free to like, share and comment and all the other stuff. I would appreciate it very much!

Let the new begin. Cache Valley Autumn, 2023