“The Sandpit” is about a day in the life of New York City, in miniature. It is shot as a high-speed time lapse, and with a “tilt-shift” depth of field effect added in post.

I have always loved time-lapse footage, and films like “Koyaanisqatsi” especially, which allow you to look at human spaces in different ways and draw comparisons between patterns at differing scales. I also really liked the tilt-shift look of making large scenes feel small and seeing places you know in a new way. I wanted to create a film that explored New York, my adopted home and somewhere that by definition feels so big, and reexplore it feeling small. I wanted to capture various different facets, areas and emotions of the city, concentrating on the lives and currents of people and vehicles moving within it. In preparation for the shoot, I did some location scouting—I had an idea of areas I wanted to shoot, including the Wall Street Heliport, the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge Park construction site, 5th Avenue, a park, etc. I spoke to friends and colleagues and spread the word that I wanted to get access to as many high places, balconies, rooftops and penthouses as possible, and with their help I was able to access a variety of locations. I was also able to shoot multiple sites from each spot, since they were so elevated, effectively giving me the feel of many more locations. I had help from my producers, Sara Eolin and Mary Joy Lu in getting in touch with some hotels and buildings being completed and gaining access to those. Many of the shots were taken from publicly accessible areas however, including the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges and Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Most of the scouting was done around the downtown and river area and completed in one day; for the rest I relied on an accurate, purchased model of New York City to check angles from places to which I had access. I also used the model to do sun studies in 3ds Max—these informed my schedule and ensured I got to each area when the sunlight angle would be good.
I did some tests using a rented tilt-shift lens, and although it produced the effect, I found it somewhat limiting to use. The camera had to be tripod mounted, as with a very small area in focus it is very difficult to stabilize afterwards. Also, the blur effect was limited to a straight “gradient” effect across the image, which works poorly when dealing with vertical elements like buildings, and was baked in at shot time. I decided to shoot on normal lenses, my Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 and Sigma 50-150mm f/2.8, to give myself more freedom.
I used a tripod for the night shots and my Joby Gorillapod (which is much more portable) where possible during the day, but many locations—like hanging over the edge of a roof or through a gap in fencing on a bridge—had to be shot hand held, and the inevitable wobble removed afterwards. I was able to track and stabilize all of the shots, and create more detailed depth mattes for foreground objects, buildings etc. and add the blur in post. This also allowed me to do some smooth camera movement and focus pulls, something that would have been very tricky to do in camera. The film was shot on a Nikon D3 (and one shot on a D80), as a series of stills. Most were shot at 4fps in DX crop mode, which was the fastest the D3 could continuously write out to the memory card. This still gave me RAW images around 2800px wide, which was plenty of space to trim down to 1920x1080. The boats had slower frame rates to make them feel a little faster, and the night shots used exposures up to two seconds each. The camera actually has an automatic cut off after 130 shots, so for longer shots I watched the countdown and quickly released and re-pressed the shutter release after 130 to keep shooting. In total I shot over 35,000 stills, 7,200 of which made it into the final edit. The entire shoot was completed in five days and two evenings.
The footage was shot as raw NEFs, which I organized and color graded in Adobe Lightroom. These were then output as 720p jpg sequences and quickly stabilized to do the initial edit. Once the edit was mostly locked, all the final footage was re-output at full 2800px resolution, tracked, stabilized and the depth-of-field effect and movement added in Eyeon Fusion, using Frischluft Lenscare. I output the final shots at 1080p. Although most shots stay with the basic gradient tilt-shift effect, some have focus pulls, or more complex depth mattes were built up along with some paint work to allow buildings to drop out of focus next to the in-focus ground. This would not have been possible if I had shot using tilt-shift lenses on the camera, which work best with relatively flat landscapes. New York City is anything but flat!

Directed, shot, cut and finished by: Sam O’Hare; produced by: Sara Eolin & Mary Joy Lu; music: composed by Human, written by Rosi Golan & Alex Wong

Sam O’Hare (US) is a director, visual-effects artist and photographer living in New York City. An architecture graduate from the UK, he worked for several years in computer animation and films for major architectural projects. After moving to New York he moved into directing commercials, continuing to create photo-real visual effects and computer animation merged with footage. He is represented by Aero Film.