This loop was the first short film I made that I was happy with, and it is the reason the others exist. It came out of a winter morning on one of the lakes from Still Water, when the fog was moving in a steady, slow drift from left to right and the far shore kept appearing and disappearing.
I had been photographing that kind of morning for months, and the photographs were good at one thing: freezing a particular arrangement of fog and trees. What they couldn’t show was the drift itself, which was the most beautiful part of standing there.
Making it
There is very little to say about the technique, which I think is a good sign. The camera went on the tripod in the same place I had been making stills. I locked exposure and focus, set the white balance to match the series, and recorded for about fifteen minutes while the fog moved through.
The only real decision was framing. I kept the horizon a little above the middle, as in most of the stills, so that there is as much reflection as sky. The drift reads in both halves, mirrored, which makes the movement feel slower and more deliberate than it was.
Editing
I found a stretch where the fog moved evenly, without a sudden gap or thickening, cut it to a few seconds and slowed it slightly. The loop point is a simple cross-fade; because the fog is soft and continuous, the seam is almost impossible to find.
Colour and contrast were matched to the prints. I added nothing — no vignette, no grading, no music.
What the film taught the photographs
After watching this loop a lot, I went back to the stills and made one change to the sequence: I put two frames of nearly the same view next to each other, made a few minutes apart, so that the difference between them suggests the movement. It is a quiet trick, and only some people notice it. But it came directly from the film.
A small format
These loops are deliberately small. They are a few seconds long, play without sound, and are compressed hard enough to load quickly. There is no player and nothing to click. I think of them as moving photographs rather than videos, and I’d rather they behaved like pictures on the page than like media that wants attention.
If you have reduced motion turned on, you’ll see a single frame instead of the loop.