Video: Instead of a majestic national park, or the crowded streets of a busy urban centre, filmmaker Drew Geraci pointed his 4K camera at a microscope with every day foods and objects magnified up to 1000X. The results are a series of atypical landscape shots you could never see with the naked human eye.
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Even more interesting than extreme close-up views of strawberries, salt and broccoli are the challenges involved with filming moving shots magnified through a microscope. A stepper motor was used to slowly move the microscope’s specimen tray while filming, but even the most imperceptible bump or vibration would ruin the shot, often requiring 10 or 20 takes to get perfectly smooth motion.
Lighting the subjects also proved tricky, and expensive, as the bulbs used in microscopes only last about three hours at full intensity and are pricey to replace. So Geraci had to set up an external LED light source to flood the tiny scene he was shooting with ample light. What’s unknown, however, is whether or not he had an equally microscopic craft services truck on set.