A Year on Planet Earth

itvX

Stephen Fry presents a year across Planet Earth

Plimsoll Productions / itvX

Director of Photography

Location DOP for presenter sequences

Specialist Photography

(macro and timelapse)

itvX

Camera: Venice, Mavo LF, Nikon D810
Specialist kit employed: eMotimo, High Speed fibre optics
Focus Puller / AC: Garath Whyte
Locations: Iceland and UK Studio
Stills Camera: Mamiya RZ67 Pro II loaded with Portra 800

Robert worked in the UK within controlled studio environments filming specialist scenes for the series. Based often in cold environments working on sets down to -35 degrees centigrade we filmed in timelapse and live action cutting into wider scenes.

Boys on Film

Location stills of Stephen were captured on Portra 800 120 / 10 film. Film is more important now than ever delivering a gently untouched view of the world: an eye on the subject that hasn't been manipulated by algorithms and processed.

Here is an example frame with the film rebate showing the portrait exactly from the camera with no processing at all.

The film was developed and drum scanned yeilding a 16-bit TIFF file approximately 140 mega pixels in size.

Portraits were used for press and marketing by ITV and Plimsoll Productions.

Below are more stills, all captured on Portra 800 with the Mamiya RZ67 Pro II 110mm f/2.8 @ f/8.

Macro & timelapse studio

Filming during lockdown meant some shift changes but the team adapted and we ran a few a months a studio to allow us to continues working on macro and timelapse sequences for the series.

Studio AC and Set Builder was Alec Davy and the studio photographers were Robert and Garath Whyte.

Working in isolation and often remotely was the seed that went onto create Time Ghost, the new custom hardware and software solution for studio plant-growth time lapse photography.