Back in the days when I had gone feral and my beard was out of control, I'd long had an idea to try and timelapse a projection of a slow motion clip somehow, but with a lack of time and the facilities to accomplish this, my best route was to try and convince someone to help me do it!

I'd dropped the idea to a few producers and directors and a chance meeting at the BBC led me to the Earth Unplugged team who produce online content in varying forms for BBC Worldwide. Initially, the idea was to use a pre-existing clip of a nature basis to project somewhere, frame by frame in time with a timelapse set up so that the background activity was sped up, and the slo-mo clip played back as you'd expect.

What was possibly one of my longest back and forth email occurrences ever, we discussed how we'd do it, where to shoot it and also the recce's involved to accomplish this. We headed over to Folkstone Docks for a recce and to see if we could project on to the giant container ships or crates and capture the manic activity of our surroundings but it wasn't to be. Work at the docks couldn't stop for filming and trying to find a location for a projector without blinding the passing drivers etc was deemed to be too much of a health and safety issue so we looked elsewhere.

A couple of weeks passed before I received that golden call with a location confirmed and to my excitement, we were going to shoot at the Latitude Festival. I've been a regular festival goer for many years now and I'll never tire of them. For me it's not just the music but the experience as a whole. Being a magnet to the outdoors, I love nothing more than sleeping in a tent and enjoying the countryside - the music, food and cider on offer is a bonus!

So - the idea was to project a pre-shot slow motion video of an owl onto a screen, frame by frame whilst capturing it, and it's surroundings a frame at a time to create a timelapse. If all went to plan, the resulting video would show the slo-mo owl whilst everything around it was sped up.

So without further ado, here's three videos we produced over the weekend of the 18th to the 21st of July 2013.

The final result

Behind the scenes

And as if I didn't have enough to shoot, we made a short how to!

What I would do differently

As with any experimental shoots, it's not always going to go to plan first time. Experience is what makes us grow and we did have a few technical challenges during our shoot. If I were to do it again, I'd try and project onto something that was floor level so there's a combination of foreground projection onto people passing as well as the screen. I'd also create some sort of trigger for the playback laptop so we wouldn't have to let each other know when to move to the next frame! This was something I wanted to do, but with various time constraints I didn't get chance.