When Bevan Percival went to bed last Tuesday night, he was pretty excited that his time-lapse film of the central plateau, newly uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo, had had over 3000 views.
But when the Taupo man got up the next morning, to his amazement, that figure had increased tenfold, with over 30,000 views and plenty of positive comments streaming into his email inbox.
Now, just over a week after launching New Zealand Landscapes Timelapse _ Volume 1, Bevan has notched up more than 44,000 views and set his sights on achieving a million hits.
New Zealand Landscapes Timelapse _ Volume 1 is a four-minute film of scenery around the Tongariro National Park, Lake Taupo and Hawkes Bay area and includes stunning footage of the movement of the moon and stars, mist streaming in and out of valleys, clouds rushing across the sky and the movement of water. It is Bevan's first attempt at a time-lapse movie and took him nearly 400 hours to create, so he's thrilled and gratified with the positive response he's had.
He uploaded it to Vimeo and YouTube on the evening of Monday, June 4, and the next day he and wife Tamzin emailed all their contacts with the link, as well as posting the link on Facebook. The film also got a mention on the Stuff website which helped it reach a wide audience.
While it has been primarily viewed in New Zealand and Australia, the film is starting to make its way further afield.
Bevan, a roading engineer, has had a passion for photography for more than 20 years. He got his first SLR camera when he was 15 and became really interested in landscape photography when he first travelled overseas.
Over the last decade his images have been good enough to be published and have regularly featured in commercial publications such as the calendars produced by Craig Potton Publishing, a company with a reputation for beautiful, high-end images which Bevan says fits with how he wants his work to be portrayed.
He got the idea of making a time-lapse film around the Central Plateau after seeing time-lapse films on the internet.
"I saw this time-lapse stuff being done on Vimeo and websites like that overseas, really high-quality stuff. The stuff with the stars looked really cool and I just thought it would be neat to try it and that you must be able to produce similar results in New Zealand.''
Bevan uses a professional Canon 5D SLR digital camera to capture his shots, puts in the time beforehand to get his settings right and then lets it do its thing. Afterwards he uses the computer to join all the frames together to make a sequence. However he knew making a time-lapse film wouldn't be an easy task. He checked out a few tutorials on the internet and learned as he went along.
"That night time stuff is really hard to do, you're pushing the limits of what a camera can achieve so there's a whole lot of tricks to getting the night time to come out all right. The low light and the long shutters speeds it's all against you really, but with the processing software now you can bring it back to how it looks to the eye.''
Bevan estimates since he began in February he's put 100 hours of shooting and 200 to 300 hours of processing into the finished result.
The 100 hours of shooting were painstaking work, often in freezing conditions late at night or early in the morning where he was at the mercy of the weather. For four hours at a stretch _ long enough to capture 600 frames or 20 seconds footage _ Bevan would be constantly babysitting his camera.
"With the night time stuff, if you accidentally bump the camera, it basically stuffs up the whole thing, and then with
the time lapse if you accidentally turn your torch on while the camera's taking a photo, that stuffs it up as well.
"And at night time the lens is prone to fogging up and that ruins the time lapse, so you
have to watch the lens and wipe it between the shots.''
He also spent much of the time freezing cold, climbing Mt Tongariro in the dark with a headlamp three times to capture star and sunrise sequences.
"One [climb] was a failure because it clouded in halfway up and sitting around doing nothing waiting for the camera to do its thing, I really felt the cold.
"There was a fair bit of craziness involved.''
To find the right music for the film was a process in itself. It wasn't easy to find some thing Bevan liked which fitted
the images but he came across music by American composer Gregg Lehrman online.
He contacted Gregg and from there had to go through a music publishing company to obtain the rights to use it and pay a fee of $125.
The success of New Zealand Landscapes Timelapse _ Volume 1 has inspired Bevan to do more and he's about to kick off work on Volume 2, which he promises will be bigger and better.
"What I'd really like to do is go down to Fiordland or some thing like that, but that ain't going to happen,'' he said.
"It'll probably be around here again, maybe a different perspective.
"I've now got a dolly which is a motorised camera rail which gives a 3D effect so I'll be using that in the next one to give it a bit of extra zing, and a lot more star stuff.''