In Depth Look Into the Creative Timelapse Project "Windscale"

Eric Paré is back with another breathtaking timelapse project known simply as "Windscale". Eric is best known for his amazing light-painting and bullet-time project, "Lightspin". While on a vacation journey from Montréal to Nevada for the popular Burning Man festival Eric and friend Marie-Line Migneault stopped to film this breathtaking short film.

What's so spectacular about this short film other than the beautiful imagery is the soundtrack which was created and produced by the filmmakers, as well after they arrived back home from their vacation.

"We drove from Montréal to Nevada in less than a month, taking time to visit parks, doing yoga and playing a lot of music along the way. Back in Montréal we took about 2 weeks to create the video, but it's really the creation of the soundtrack that turned out to take way more time than expected."

I asked Eric how different this project was from his impressive light-painting projects that he undertakes involving huge amounts of equipment and time to complete, and if it interfered with the enjoyment of some downtime.

"The shooting was done 100% while on vacation, and at no moment it interfered with simple enjoyment of being free. My previous projects were done in studio, with the pressure of doing tons of other projects at the same time. WindScale has been done with no expectation, it's more like a good souvenir for us. I'll still keep being dedicated to stop-motion light-painting.

After having worked for months in a small dark confined room with 24 cameras, I really needed to get out and see the sun. So instead of using 24 cameras we were doing mostly 24 stop motion frames to simulate what we were doing in studio. But for each pose, we were waiting enough time to make sure to get some movements in the clouds (thus the mix of stop-motion and time-lapse techniques)"

During their journey and while at Burning Man Eric and Marie accomplished some pretty amazing light-painting portraits. I asked Eric how he was able to capture the portraits out in the open in a non-controlled (non-studio) setting and what his techniques were.

"It's much harder for me to do light-painting outside than in studio. The goal when doing this outside, is to reveal some of the surroundings, but most of the time I will appear in the picture (or block some of the background). It's usually not a problem with light-painting, but in my case, as I'm doing most of my pictures in one second I don't really have the time to hide myself. I only have 2 light-painting pictures from the road-trip that turned out okay, but that was enough to give me an idea on how to manage the technique once arrived at Burning Man. Then I was able to go much further, even if the conditions were pretty harsh, with the wind, dust storms, noise and the craziness of the festival. I have planned to release a full video with the stop-motion light-painting I did at Burning Man."

Diego Rodarte-Amor

I am always blown away with the sheer creativity coming from Eric's light-painting. I asked what inspired him to start utilizing light-painting in his photography and videography.

"Back in summer 2012, I did some corporate gigs with Timecode Lab where we were using 10 cameras to make live bullet-time light-painting. That was basic but pretty fun. Weeks later we installed the full rig at our studio and we invited Patrick Rochon, an internationally recognized light-painter. This have been a revelation for me. His dedication to this art really inspired me and pushed me to go further and to find a way to make stop-motion to animate the whole process. This lead me to create LightSpin, after many months of experiments in the dark."

"Also, on the way back after Burning Man, I received an invitation to go to India to be featured in a TV show as a visual artist (because the producers saw LightSpin on Vimeo). The concept was to document and create a full song + music video within a week, in a lovely village in the Himalayas. My task was to create some animated light-painting sequences with Monica Dogra, the signer of the song "Suspended" composed by Engine Earz. The episode has been presented on a prime time on MTV India in November."

Jeanne Sanchez

When asked what Eric was doing now that he's back in the studio and back at work he replied with the following:

"We're currently back in the studio with a slightly different setup, and we're now able to shoot in raw mode with the 24 cameras, thus giving us better possibilities for post-processing. However it is crazy complicated to manage thousands of raw files. For each stop motion sequence, I trigger the cameras every 3 seconds for a hundred times, for a total of 2400 raw files generated in only five minutes. Outch. New projects will be revealed in early april. In the mean time, I started uploading some of my animated pictures on instagram, where the square format is giving a new life to my 360 degree pictures."

You can find more of Eric's work on his website, Facebook page, Vimeo and Instagram