Mountains, racing clouds and shifting light fill Awakening | New Zealand 4K, a time-lapse film by German photographer Martin Heck and his company Timestorm Films. Heck spent about four months in New Zealand hiking into the mountains, driving back roads and camping under the stars to make it. Gizmodo summed up the result as a trip to Lord of the Rings land.
Martin Heck and Timestorm Films
Heck is a professional photographer based in Germany who began shooting time-lapse around 2009, inspired by filmmakers such as Tom Lowe, Enrique Pacheco and Randy Halverson. Timestorm Films, his production company, specialises in motion-control time-lapse cinematography and is largely a one-man operation, with assistants joining on bigger projects. His work has featured repeatedly in the Time Lapse Network’s annual “Best of” awards.
Awakening was released in spring 2014 as part one of a planned four-part series.
How the 4K time-lapse was filmed
A time-lapse is built from thousands of still photographs taken at fixed intervals and played back as video. If a camera fires every five seconds and the film runs at 25 frames per second, each second on screen covers more than two minutes of real time. That compression is what turns slow-moving clouds into rivers and makes the night sky visibly rotate.
According to PetaPixel, Heck’s kit for Awakening included:
- Cameras: a Canon 6D and a Canon 550D (Rebel T2i).
- Lenses: Canon 24–105mm f/4L, Canon 70–200mm f/4L, Canon 15–85mm and a Samyang 14mm f/2.8 for wide night skies.
- Motion control: a Dynamic Perception Stage One slider and an eMotimo TB3 Black pan-and-tilt head, which move the camera a tiny step between frames to create smooth, gliding shots.
- Software: Lightroom 5 and LRTimelapse for processing the stills, then After Effects and Premiere Pro CS6 for editing.
New Zealand’s mountains: the setting
New Zealand gives a time-lapse photographer extraordinary variety within short distances. The Southern Alps run for about 500 kilometres along the South Island and culminate in Aoraki / Mount Cook, at 3,724 metres the highest point in the country, with sixteen other summits above 3,000 metres. A late-1970s inventory counted more than 3,000 glaciers in the range; the longest, the Tasman Glacier, stretches 23.5 kilometres.
The mountains are still growing. They rise along the boundary between the Pacific and Australian plates, where the Alpine Fault carries the land mostly sideways and pushes the range upwards, the same forces that make the scenery so steep and dramatic.
Why it feels like Middle-earth
Peter Jackson filmed The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies in New Zealand, and the country has leaned into its image as Middle-earth ever since. Reviewers reached for that comparison as soon as Awakening appeared, thanks to its jagged peaks, empty valleys and moody skies. To visit a real film set, the Hobbiton movie set near Matamata on the North Island is open for guided tours; see our guide to Hobbiton near Matamata: Film Design and the Visitor Experience.
For more New Zealand on film, see New Zealand framed through a camper-van window, or compare another long project in Yosemite’s extended time-lapse project.
Related reading
- Oliver Würffell’s Wisconsin Winter Film
- Balloon-Access Skiing in New Zealand: The Idea behind an Old Announcement
- A KiwiRail Train Clears Snow near Arthur’s Pass
- Waitomo Caves: Glowworms, Limestone and the People Behind the Tours
- Ten Australian Travel Ideas: Choose a Region, Then Give It Time
Sources
- Video: AWAKENING | NEW ZEALAND 4K ULTRA HD, Timestorm Films; also on Vimeo.
- PetaPixel: Stunning ‘Awakening’ 4K time-lapse (May 2014)
- Time Lapse Network: interview with Martin Heck
- Southern Alps – Wikipedia
- Image: Timestorm Films / Awakening.
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