Hasta La Ideas

Michael Moloney and John Hooper’s film, 24 hours, Pavey Ark, is included in the If You Could Collaborate show. You can now watch their beautiful time lapse piece here, and find out how they made it…

24 hours, Pavey Ark from Michael Moloney Studio

In the catalogue for the If You Could Collaborate show, director Michael Moloney and photographer John Hooper discuss their piece, filmed over 24 hours on a hill in the Great Langdale area of the Lake District in Cumbria in the north west of England.

“We shot continuously for 24 hours with the camera rotating twice through 360º, coming away with over 5,000 photographs,” says Moloney.

The pair were keen to introduce a series of man-made elements into the film, and so added various lighting effects that gradually reach a crescendo during the night shoot.

Hooper explains that they used “camera flashes to give us a controlled, brighter light source with minimal power supply. For us to achieve a film through 720º, we needed a very precise motor to turn the camera in increments of 0.16º – this would give us 4,500 increments at 25 frames per second and we would end up with a three minute film.”

Hooper then contacted Marc Kairies of MK Panorama Systeme, who agreed to hire such a motor to the filmmakers. But how to power the thing, 2,500ft up a mountain?

Well, they borrowed a generator from a friend at Honda magazine and lugged it up the hill with the help of some locals. How collaborative is that?

“Once the sun went down, we ran up and down the mountain for the next 14 hours setting off the flashes to a script devised by Mike based on a future music score of 96bpm, ” says Hooper. The score itself was eventually composed by Tim Phillips.

And the outcome? 

“I’d only a vague idea of how the final film might look,” says Moloney, “and for me, that was the most exciting thing about the project – not really knowing if it would work until we put all the individual photographs together.”

24 hours, Pavey Ark is on show at If You Could Collaborate – which runs from 15-24 January at the A Foundation Gallery at the Rochelle School, London E2 7ES. The gallery is open 12-6pm and until 9pm on 21 January. More information at ifyoucould.co.uk/collaborate.

Also accompanying the exhibition is a 312-page catalogue (£15) that sheds light on the various creative processes that the artists used to create their pieces of work (and from which the above quotes from Moloney and Hooper were taken).

Moloney is working on adding an HD version of the film on Vimeo.