Mick Harper spent most of the last year looking down on Prince George. He developed a very small view of his home city. And now audiences here and around the world are eating it up with applause of clicks of the "watch again" button.
Life In Miniature was Harper's tiny opus to his beloved city. The professional filmmaker and multimedia artist (he is the creative director at Live Work Communications) unveiled this six-minute tribute at a reception this week at The Exploration Place where it is now playing indefinitely in the museum's in-house theatre. It is also on Harper's website, his Facebook page, on the Vimeo film channel and audiences are already agog at the stance of seeing Prince George, in some of its happiest moments, depicted like ants below a soaring bird or toys seen by some towering child.
It's like seeing Prince George as an episode of Thomas The Tank Engine, and that animated realism quality isn't a mistake. Yes, those are actual scenes of Prince George - the bustle of Summerfest, the spectacle of a Cougars game including an Out Of Alba concert, the colour of the Pride Parade, the solemn respect of the Remembrance Day ceremony, the electrified excitement of the Canada Winter Games 100 Days party, the splendor of lakes and cutbanks and rivers, familiar places like UNBC and Lheidli T'enneh Memorial Park - a vivid cross-section of our collective daily life.
Most of it is shot from a high vantage point, looking down on these scenes from rare angles. The camera is always stationary and even though it appears to the viewer to be a speed-altered movie it is actually made from splicing thousands of rapid-fire still images together. Still images record no sound, so the music Harper licensed to run throughout the show and the sonic effects (train whistles, slapshots, traffic hum, river currents, bicycle bells, etc.) accompanying the images were all layered over the images after they were sequenced into film scenes.
Also at play is the effect of a special lens technique Harper used called tilt-shift. That, and the lurchy, imperfect flow of the still images strung together at super speed - like a flip-it book on electro steroids - creates the effect of Prince George in miniature.
"There are many different types of time-lapse filming possible. I chose tilt-shift because there is something magical about it," said Harper. "People get this twinkle in their eye. It takes me back to my childhood, and I think other people have that sense as well. And when we had the first private screening, I was listening to people's reactions as they watched it. I could see the smiles on their faces, I could hear the chuckles when they saw things that looked familiar but never observed quite like that before. It took them a second to recognize each scene, like realizing the steam engine at Lheidli T'enneh Park was the real thing, like the shots at Mr. PG weren't faked, like that really was the actual Remembrance Day ceremony."
Tilt-shift lenses add a touch of blurriness to the individual shots, and slightly but perceptibly alter the perspective of the images, based on the way the photographer manipulates the lens angles. In Harper's case he exclusively used Canon ST lenses with a Canon 6D body. He said he could have used post-production software to get the same effect, but he wanted to achieve this effect manually.
He undertook five months of shooting, one month of editing, and in consultation with partners who joined his project, he timed the release of the short film to coincide with the main civic celebrations of Prince George's centennial.
"I'd seen other tilt-shift movies for New York, Boston, San Francisco and a really stunning one for Singapore," he said. "It wasn't until I saw one for Calgary that made me go hold on, if they can do it, we can do it. At that point I wanted to know all about how to make it happen, so I started to look into it. I saw Calgary's at Spark Centre, their version of Exploration Place, and an awesome place to take your kids, so naturally I went to (The Exploration Place executive director) Tracy Calogheros and asked her if she'd be interested in screening something like that. She was all over it - all in."
The City of Prince George joined the project as well, and he got some key support from a private company also. The importance of that relationship is best seen in the eye-to-eye perspective Harper got with Mr. PG, one of the sequences in the film that demonstrated the extent of his commitment to the art.
"I knew I needed a crane to achieve some of the shots I had in my head, and shoot what I could see in my minds eye, so I approached a number of companies about using one of their cranes or lifts," said Harper. "The only company that stepped up was Northern Electric and they told me it was anything I needed, anytime. This film would not have been possible without Exploration Place and the City of Prince George, but to get the film's effect would not have been possible without Northern Electric."
Altogether, he is happy with the film's ability to accurately reflect Prince George back to its resident viewers and accurately depict Prince George to strangers.
"I actually think Prince George itself played a production role in the making of this film," Harper said. "If you want to do something here, you'll get people's support. This community is great that way. You just have to explain what you want to do. Not everybody understood what tilt-shift photography was, at first, but once I explained what I was doing, just about everyone tried their best to help me out. I didn't get everything I wanted, but I was always happy with what I did get."
He got a lot. He estimated he shot 250 gigabytes of images. He was able to use only a fraction of those sequences for the film, so he has much to share, and he is still thinking about new sequences to shoot. Future projects like a sequel or companion films are on the list of possibilities.
He did already whip together a complementary second feature, of sorts, and it took off in ways he could never have predicted. He shot off a scad of stills of the Canada Day fireworks show, sequenced them into a two-minute dervish of colour in the dark sky of Prince George, set it to music and posted it to his website.
The same day his Life In Miniature film premiered at The Exploration Place, the fireworks video got posted by American mega-website Business Insider. It gets about 55 million unique hits per month, so if even a fraction of them see Harper's fireworks show, it will be an intensely successful postcard to the world from Prince George.
