The beauty to be found just beyond what the eye can see.

An ultra-macro journey of everyday household objects: Soy sauce, mushrooms, sea salt…

When the world descended into chaos with COVID-19 and the UK went into lockdown, I looked to challenge myself with an epic but very tiny film. ‘After All’ was shot and edited over a month.

Most of what you see in the film is made of focus stacked images. At ultra macro scale the depth of field is very narrow, meaning to keep things sharp each frame is combination of 30+ images.

Three Robots

To achieve the ambition of this project I needed three programmable helpers. The most important of which was the focus stacking rail. Which allowed for focus stacking of 30-50 images to create the mesmerising depth of field of our miniature world.

Experiments

This project is filled with experiments. Here is 2 stanley blades acting as miniature flags. Most of the shots took 3+ hours to create a three second sequence due to the focus stacking. So a meditative experience to say the least.

Light Play

For some sequences I first animated a sequence in after effects then utilising the iPad as a second screen played the animation frame by frame to light the quartz crystal. Loved this simple setup!