PlantPop’s Time Lapse Studio – GardenRant

In last week’s post about the PlantPop film production company and film festival I promised a separate post about their time-lapse studio, and here ya go.

Indeed, one of the coolest events of the festival weekend was a visit to their very special studio inside a very innocuous-looking garage on the grounds of Lancaster Farms, the wholesale nursery in Suffolk, Va. Here’s how PlantPop’s website describes it:

“Here at our farm, we have built a pretty sophisticated time-lapse studio. In a blacked-out garage near the main office, seven stations silently crank out miraculous films of beautiful plants that we pluck from our growing fields and place in the spotlight…Then, the magic happens: gorgeous stills turn into moving images. And they do move us. (Personally, I’ve shed more tears than I care to admit.)” quoting executive producer Art Parkerson.

For examples of the magic, click here or on the image below.

Now let’s get geeky.

The set-up

Why inside a blacked-out garage? The cameras have to be indoors because you need to control both the light and the wind.  And water needs to be applied gradually to avoid drooping and then popping up again after a big watering. So water is applied at just one tablespoon per hour.

The studio’s seven stations each have multiple cameras – either two or three (with three cameras they can be set for different focal points, also both portrait and vertical mode – for Instagram.) Cheap old cameras are used here, nothing automatic, and they’ve found that old glass like the 30-40-year-old glass in the cameras they use has character and is “amazing!”

Sometimes a turntable is used, to move the plant around, and in the future they’ll also make it possible to move the camera up and down, to film plants as they grow upward.

How the films are made

Each station has a grow light and a photo light, both of which are turned on at specified intervals – they’ve settled on every three minutes as optimal. So in quick succession the grow light is turned off, the photo light is turned on, and a photo is taken. That image is automatically sent to a server; then all the images are curated by hand to make sure any defects are removed before the final film is exported.

Little computers are programmed up the wazoo to accomplish many tasks: watering the plants, turning the grow lights and photo lights on and off, actuating shutters on at least 14 cameras, and sending the very large, high-resolution RAW images to the editing computers.

In this photo Clayton Leverett is demonstrating the set-up and shooting process of using our Jib Arm. “The Jib Arm allows us to move and focus the camera smoothly in a 3D space via phone app so we can get every angle of a plant. This even includes macro shots! We do not use the Jib for time lapse at this point in time.”

I also asked if there were other time lapse studios like this and learned that there’s just one they know of – an even more sophisticated one in Bristol, England, which is used for more than just plants. So PlantPop’s studio is probably the only one of its kind, specifically for plants.

The photographer

Making time-lapse films about plants is a pretty unique job, so I asked Clayton about his background and he wrote that:

He sees his career as “not super exciting.” (Others may disagree.) “I’ve been doing photography seriously since I was 12 when I wanted to enter an art show at my school, so my dad gave me one of his Nikon cameras (a D100, then a D70).  I do also love to fly drones, so I do drone photography whenever I have an excuse to as well!” He studied photography at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

“I would suggest describing myself as a ‘plant nerd in training.’ I do love plants, and I think I know more than the average person about them, but I am certainly not nearly as knowledgeable as someone like PlantPop’s hort consultant Kendahl Huber, and her decades of experience are absolutely invaluable to my being able to get plants into the studio looking their best and at the exact right time to get the best results. I hope to achieve the title of ‘official plant nerd’ one day!”

Where the films are seen – now and potentially

Today only short snippets shot in portrait mode are posted to Instagram but the actual films aren’t distributed anywhere. Executive producer (and patron) Art Parkerson told us he never wants people to view them on their phones, and I get that. Below is my quick shot of what we saw during the film festival – time-lapse clips shown on the domed ceiling of the  Old Dominion University planetarium. To borrow a term from my college days, it was trippy!

I can understand why these mind-blowing short films aren’t available for free on YouTube or anywhere else, but where IS an appropriate and potentially income-producing venue for them? Art told us about showing them to garden centers, many of which don’t have any display stations in their stores, so it would be quite a change for them.

Speaking of change, in Art’s experience, the industry doesn’t change fast. The example he gave was from the 1990s when plant tags first began using color photos and many thought it was “stupid.” Today, people can’t imagine that time lapse can appeal to customers, but maybe that will change.

Another possibility is creating a commercial division of their time-lapses, for plants they sell, like pansies.  Says Art, “The future in plant marketing is motion,” and he’d like to see this studio be the production house for ad agencies. 

Currently PlantPop can only film the plants they grow themselves but they may eventually have studios in places like Florida, California and Amsterdam, or simply license studios to someone else in those locations and others.

A final word from Art: “I believe in the power of plants and I believe in the power of cinema, so combining them is cool.” And simply showing nursery fields doesn’t convey the power of plants.

So true! Just like showing you the exterior of the studio fails to convey the magic that’s going on inside.