Rich Passage I is a 77′ low-wake passenger ferry designed by the Bellingham-based company All American Marine. The vessel was designed specifically for Kitsap County to provide an efficient low impact commuter solution that would not erode the coastline. I shot both stills and motion clips with a Canon 5D Mark II from a helicopter near Blake Island (between Bremerton and Seattle).
Rich Passage I – Aerial Video from Daniel Nelson on Vimeo.
View HD version of Journey Through a Log here.
As I’ve dabbled in sculpture, I’ve become particularly fascinated by interior spaces of wood. Any time a cut is made through wood, we get a snapshot of the inside, but we rarely get to see any continuity between these spaces.
This video is a journey through the interior of about 3′ of a log. For each of the 113 frames, a physical cross-section of wood was cut off (in a long, sawdusty, painful process). “Journey Through a Log” is the resulting stop motion.
How does an ember move and change shape over time? What if we could perceive it’s incremental shape changes as a fluid motion? This short is my first attempt at finding out…
The Life of Embers is available to view and download in 720p HD on Vimeo.
Each frame is a 2 second exposure shot exactly two seconds apart. I chose this long shutter speed so the flames would blur out and wouldn’t distract from the embers. Every clip is shown at a constant speed, and all but the second to last is shown both normally and in reverse. In addition to looking really cool, I found that reversing the motion actually made it easier to see what was happening. By sampling relatively long units of time and compressing them as a time lapse, this project addresses many of the opposite questions as my last blog post.
Thanks to my friend Dave for letting me use his burn barrel and high powered fan for shooting.
As I’ve begun learning to make things with metal, I’ve been captivated by many of the unintentional visual artifacts left behind. Techniques like welding, plasma cutting, hammering, and oxy-acetylene torching are generally used to modify a 3D form, but I wanted to make a piece that specifically highlights the artifacts they leave behind.
This video below is a stop motion of 447 frames captured over about 15 minutes of torching a 24″x24″ piece of sheet steel. Even though I’ve put a lot of hours in using this technique, this is actually the first time I’ve been able to watch the process without darkening effect of protective eye wear and the pressure of operating the torch.
NOTE: For proper viewing, click the link to my Vimeo page and view full screen in 720p HD
Oxy-Acetylene Torch on Brushed Steel from Daniel Nelson on Vimeo.
I brushed the steel beforehand to remove the oily milling on the outside, so the temperature changes would be more visible.
The rainbow outlines the edges of the areas that have been heated, while the dot is literally glowing hot.
The fading intensity of the glow traces where the torch as been. Note the dark blistered circles in the areas that received the most heat.
