Babcock, Rosyth
Last August, we placed two Lobster Pot cameras at Rosyth Dockyard for Babcock, the UK’s leading engineering support services organisation. Babcock are assembling the HMS Queen Elizabeth for the Aircraft Carrier Alliance (ACA) – an alliance between Babcock, BAE Systems, Thales and the Ministry of Defence. The QE class carriers, at 280 metres long and weighing 65000 tonnes, will be the UK’s largest and most powerful warships, providing the armed forces with a four acre military operating base which can be deployed worldwide. Here’s a shot from camera 1:
And from camera 2:
Alan Clark, Head of Project – QEC, says “Lobster Pictures has delivered a cost effective solution to the needs of the project. The two cameras installed onsite are in prime locations allowing the public to watch the UK’s largest warships take shape”.
The ship is being built in large individual blocks at six shipyards around the UK and transported by sea to Rosyth for final assembly and integration. We filmed time lapse of the 8000 tonne mid hull section known as Lower Block three – built in Govan and transported by barge – as it made its way majestically up the Firth of Forth, under the iconic rail and road bridge.
We were also commissioned to build a ‘microsite’ for the project. As a major part of the Aircraft Carrier Alliance’s web presence, this site – www.qecassembly.co.uk – contains stills, video and time lapse produced by Lobster Pictures, and is updated every week, showing the latest work at the yard. We don’t often build sites for clients, but when we do, we make sure they’re agency-standard, and completely in line with your organisation’s brief and brand guidelines.
How to Grow a Planet
Our work last year on BBC2′s “How to Grow a Planet” has finally come to fruition (excuse the pun). Five Lobster Pot cameras in a garden in Scotland, show the growing processes of bluebells and apples over five months. See our previous blog post for more details – the show was provisionally titled ‘Science of Plants’.
Oxfam, Bolivia
We’re extremely proud to be working for Oxfam in Bolivia. Oxfam are supporting the adaptation of an ancestral farming and water management technique called camellones (raised platforms of land, surrounded by water channels). This helps disaster-prone communities in Beni adapt to climatic extremes and find new ways of making a living.
Peter Tecks will be shooting time lapse of the harvest from the camellones and surveying a couple of sites for long-term time lapse over the next two weeks.
Matthew Day Jackson
The international contemporary art gallery Hauser & Wirth asked us for some very specialist time lapse last summer, and we’re now able to write about it. American artist Matthew Day Jackson held an exhibition at the London gallery – Everything Leads to Another. Part of this was a series of ‘golems’ – representations of the artist’s body, sculpted from different materials. ‘Food Golem – sweet’ was photographed, then taken off to the launch party to be eaten. ‘Food Golem – savoury’ – made from a terrine of pork gelatine and vegetables – was photographed, then shipped off to a secret location in East London…
And that’s where we come in. We were asked to design and build an entire lighting and time lapse photography rig of the highest possible quality – in order to create a fine-art standard time lapse film of the Golem deteriorating. We designed a rig made from lightweight aluminum, and used the equivalent of 20kw of low-temperature, low-power, colour-accurate ‘grow lights’ from Green’s Horticulture here in Bristol. Matthew wanted the film to have a look that was as ‘flat and surgical as possible’ – these lights really worked to create the right effect.
Here’s John testing the rig out for size in the workshop. Technically, we used a modified Lobster Pot. We used a Canon 5D mk 2, standard for our Lobster Pot Extreme model, with the exceptionally fine Nikon 17-35 lens. The system shot a frame every ten minutes, for four months, with JPEG files going to Lobster Vision so that Matthew, based in New York, could check on progress at any time. The system had a mirrored pair of terabyte drives, so that RAW files at 5616 x 3744 could be stored safely.
At the end of the job, we had two drives with about 25,000 files on each, and we needed a team of industrial cleaners to clean up the equipment, which had become a somewhat smelly haven for flies…
The work was post-produced by Mark Wayman at ADi Audiovisual, for 4k display at a gallery in Switzerland.
Stargazing – Live
No, not the BBC series, but we’ve been out shooting astro-time lapse in darkest Wales. We’ve found a great new location, with the help of our Dark Skies Map – though the dreaded orange glow from streetlamps is still a little bit visible.
Here’s a video with some typical Welsh Weather coming across:
Here’s a couple of stills from the last two days (click for bigger):
Finally, a big welcome to Thom, the newest member of the team, who joined us just before Christmas. Here’s his first time lapse for Lobster Pictures:
Mexico: Monclova
For our client Siemens VAI we travelled to Mexico and installed two Lobster Pot monitoring and time lapse cameras. These are covering the installation of a Steckel Mill for AHSMA. This is the fourteenth country we’ve worked in in the last three years, and the ninth using 3G cellular. Naturally, we made a time lapse of the stunning scenery on the road from Monterrey to Monclova:
Tecnoconference, Florence
We installed a Lobster Pot in Florence, Italy, for a new client. Tecnoconference are a large events technology company, covering over 1400 events every year.
Like all our systems, this has a cellular connection, and allows the client and stakeholders to view, monitor and share very high resolution imagery of the site, all the time, from anywhere. Here are a couple of good shots from the camera, we like the deep blue skies and rolling Tuscan hills in the background….
THE SWARM, Thorpe Park
We placed a Lobster Pot at THORPE PARK for the Merlin Entertainments Group – our second project for “the most exciting leisure company in the world”. This is to create time lapse and monitor construction of THE SWARM, Europe’s fastest and tallest winged rollercoaster, opening in Spring 2012.
Chris Brzezicki, Assistant Project Manager at Merlin Entertainments Group, said “Lobster Pictures completely nailed it the last time round with the LEGOLAND Windsor Resort Hotel. The camera allows us to view the site from all over the world, and is providing a unique and memorable record of the construction”
Here’s one of the first shots from the Lobster Pot: 
Who’s Lenny?
We were proud to support See No Evil, Europe’s biggest permanent street art installation, bringing internationally-renowned artists and some of the world’s biggest artworks to one of the less-pretty parts of our lovely home city of Bristol. We provided a Lobster Pot camera which proved really popular for online viewing, and the time lapse has been incorporated into a short documentary, produced by our friends at Hurricane Media:
Safety First
We’ve been asked to ‘rescue’ time lapse cameras provided by others – that have been mounted unsafely, or just don’t work – a few times now. So I thought it would be a good time to share some experiences we’ve had in this field.
Firstly, this week we recconoitered a site in the UK, and while there we saw a time lapse camera covering another angle on the same site. Here’s a picture:
So, other than the fact that they’re using sandbags to weigh the camera down, there seem to be multiple dangling cables with no sort of restraint, a couple of random flagstones, and of course a big plastic box. Our cameras are self-contained, and mounted safely, on professional bracketry with no trailing wires.
Carrying on the sandbag theme, here’s a system that we rescued in London a little while back:
This one proved that if you make your camera mount out of a huge wooden sled, and place it on a smooth roof with a downward angle and no parapet, guess what? When the rain comes, it will slide off. In this case, it had fallen on to a public area, and it was pure luck that no-one was underneath at the time. We made it safe.
But – where are the sandbags, I hear you ask? Well, they’re so small, you need a close-up:
That’s approximately 6kg of mini-sand bags, suitable for ballasting a doll’s house in a quiet room.
A couple of things about that camera. Wiring, not very safe:
Also, if you can see the sky through holes in the casing, it’s probably not really weatherproof:
The second camera we found on this site (not working, horizon off-balance and out of focus) was mounted on a tripod:
Really. We love tripods. But they’re only any good if they have an operator behind them. Otherwise they don’t tend to keep very still if it gets windy…
Moving on, here’s a scaffolding tower, built by a well-meaning but inexperienced subcontractor for one of our clients.
We weren’t ready to risk using this – so we consulted with a UK scaffolding engineer, and provided a comprehensive report of the safety issues. A new tower was built, and certified to EU safety standards.
Finally, here’s a ladder we found on a site – again, not in the UK:
There’s a serious point to be made here. We love doing our job, and we love the films that we make for clients. But no shot is ever worth risking our safety, or the safety of others for. We follow rigorous UK work-at-height regulations, wherever in the world we’re working. Three of our engineers are first-aiders. All engineers have IPAF licenses for operating cherrypickers and scissor lifts, and CSCS site safety cards. We devise – and follow, meticulously – comprehensive risk assessments and method statements for every single job that we do, and we’re learning all the time.
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