Life in the Vertical » short film

Review and Link: Steep Scotland

Mark Reeves — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 14:31:45 +0000

Well I had been tipped off about this video before I caught someone in the act of skiing down No. 4 Gully. Basically two ski instructors come back from the alps in may and tear down some of the steepest and most intimidating gullies in Scotland. This video has so much action it seems never to stop. My favourite quote was, “Don’t Fall, I am right on your heels”, just as the camera man drops into the gully after the lead man, and pursues him down capturing the action.

Anyway I think I have said enough, here is a link to the YouTube video.

Video: 2010 a climbing oddity

Mark Reeves — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 18:10:57 +0000

Here is a short video on my 2010 in pictures, several hundred of them as a flicker book. I hope you enjoy. I am having problems with my idea of having a podcast so will continue with you tube.

The Joshua Tree Sunset

Mark Reeves — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 23:16:48 +0000

Sorry its not as nice as it could have been, as I threw my tripod out. I might have to buy one to do more of these stop motion animations. The video is on my vimeo site. Link is here. I set it to U2′s With or Without You, one of my favourite tunes from the Joshua Tree Album.

Sunset over Joshua Tree from mark reeves on Vimeo.

Snap Shot of my Minds Eye – How was it made?

Mark Reeves — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 10:47:00 +0000

A few people have ask how it was made, in an attempt to answer this question, I am going to concentrate on the last Deep Water Soloing section, which was by far the hardest most intensive section to produce. It all start with a friend who had a poster by Dave Hockney, he did some famous photomontages. I was out climbing Electric Blue and decided to try and make a massive photo collage. I eventually after two days got all the photos for the collage (over 100 images), it took days to stick all the images to a piece of A1 card!

I lost the collage several years ago. However I still had the negatives, a week of scanning on a flatbed scanner later, followed by a week putting them together with adobe Illustrator, and I had the ‘master’ collage. It then occured to me that I could take a photo away, then save as a Jpeg, and keep doing this until there were no photos left. I would then be able to use each image as a form of stop animation.

I then used Final Cut Pro to zoom in on each JPeg and animate them. This took about two weeks of work, as each frame had to be animated individual. Meaning that each frame had to have an X,y vector start point, a %zoom start point and then an x,y vector finish point and % zoom finish point. The next frame would then have to start at the exact coordinates at were the previous frame finished. So it was an slow and fiddly process!

It wasn’t until several years later that I film people slowing, which happened to be from a similar location, it was then possible to simply add it to the collage.

So that’s how I did it!