Pipe Plant from Sasha Aleksandrov on Vimeo.

It took 2 months of shooting for Moscow-based filmmaker Sasha Aleksandrov to capture the re-painting of the exteriors of an expansive Cold War-era industrial factory. It all unfolds in dramatic time-lapse in less than 4 minutes. To make the video, Aleksandrov shot by hand and on foot, using just a typical Nikon and a tripod. This meant that Aleksandrov, who calls himself an “operator”, had to set up a shot, take it, move the tripod over a foot (or precisely 29 cm, he maintains), before repeating the process thousands of times. He then used an off-the-shelf software to stabilize the shots in post-production.

The result of this intensive labor is a combination of stop-motion and time-lapse photography, otherwise known as hyper-lapse sequences, whereby the footage is made dynamic through the introduction of rotations and pans. So when the camera begins to move, that’s Aleksandrov following along the ground at 11-inch intervals over the course of an afternoon. As for the paint job itself, it’s a kind of Suprematist pastiche with typeface meant for Bolshevik slogans. But any excuse to photograph more decommissioned factories, right?

by Samuel Medina

posted in Uncategorized

tagged factory, industry, paint, photography, russia, stop motion, time lapse

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