Solstice

A film that begins before sunrise and ends after dusk, cut down to three minutes without ever leaving the frame it started in.

Approach

The idea was simple enough to explain in a sentence and difficult enough to make that it took two attempts. One camera position, eighteen hours, and no other variable but the light. The product sits in shot the entire time; what changes around it is the day.

The first attempt failed on cloud cover. We struck the setup at four in the afternoon, waited three weeks for a clear forecast, and started again.

Holding the frame

Locking a camera for eighteen hours is less about the rig than about everything that wants to move — focus breathing as the temperature drops, the tripod settling into soft ground, exposure drifting through a nine-stop range between dawn and dusk.

We shot on a geared head bolted to a plate, pulled focus once at midday, and let the exposure ramp happen in camera rather than correcting it later. The drift is the film.

Delivery

A three-minute cut for the campaign site, a sixty for broadcast, and a real-time eighteen-hour version that ran silently in three stores for the week of the solstice.