Fantastic fun guy, features super satisfying time lapse footage that was filmed over the course of 15 years by this pioneering artist.

My name is Louie Schwartzberg.

I'm a filmmaker and I love to take audiences on journeys through time and scale and that, that's a real rush.

Let's go behind the scenes and find out how these time lapses were made for fantastic fun guy.

Well, I think the biggest surprise for people watching the film is they think that it's all filmed outdoors and there's a lot of reasons why you can't film time lapse of plants and fungi outdoors.

Number one, there's wind, which would make the object shake and rattle and looked like a charlie Chaplin movie.

Number two, there are bugs and other elements that would interfere with the filming.

The light has to be constant.

You know, even during the day to like fluctuates.

So I built the studio on top of my garage.

If I was shooting one frame every 15 minutes, that means I'm shooting for frames of our times.

24 is 96 frames, 96 frames is four seconds of film.

So the way it works is I have somebody build an interval ah meter for me.

Interferometer means it triggers the camera one frame at a time.

There you go.

In 24 hours.

We'll have one second of film.

It also triggers the grow lights to come on and off and the photo lights and the photo lights is the beauty light, the gorgeous tabletop cinematography lighting.

The grow lights are these sort of led lights that are kind of weird and pink.

I think they were developed for people growing cannabis and I'm able to program the grow lights to be like sunrise and sunset.

If I leave the girl lights on 24 hours they die.

I set up shots in the morning.

I check them at night.

I realized I've turned it into a spiritual practice.

It actually literally gets me up in the morning because as soon as I'm out of bed, I'm thinking, oh, I wonder what the flower did last night.

Is it still in frame?

Is it in focus?

I have to imagine what the framing and composition is gonna look like tomorrow or two days from now or a week from now.

And that is a transformational experience because you have to put your mind into the mindset and the intention of the flower or the fungi thinking where it's going to grow, how big will it get And if you're right boy, it's a rush.

And if you're wrong, it means you just got to do it all over again, louis and his team consulted mike.

Ologists, fungi experts on how to grow mushrooms in an environment free from bacteria and bugs for the film, but which was the most photogenic fungus.

Lion's mane have these little kind of tiny tentacles that would emerge and they would wiggle And this really beautiful wave like pattern, I'd say roughly, you know, the ratio of success to failure.

It's roughly about one out of six, maybe one out of 10.

It's extremely difficult to do when I'm shooting at the close up of the fungi growing.

We create a miniature set moss and logs and rocks.

Time lapse, macro cinematography.

Your depth of field is very shallow.

We use macro lenses, 100 millimeter cannon, 180 millimeter canon and a 35 millimeter micro lens.

So naturally audience won't be focusing on the background.

If I'm doing a more of a master shot where we use for example, motion control, we will put up a blue screen and then we will composite in a sky or a forest to really make it believable to be able to move.

The camera was something that was impossible to do in special effects prior to motion control cinematography.

So with motion control data cameras and combined it with computers to do a repeat move meaning it shoots one frame, it stops, shoots another frame and stops.

And you have this controlled dolly move while the mushroom is growing basically it's dolly track and a tripod head that now has little motors on it that enables the computer to program a pan a tilt and the length of the move on the dolly as well as control the camera and focus all these things have to be working together as if it was a real time shot.

But one critical component of the fungi story was impossible to film using traditional techniques.

The mycelium is like the tree and the mushroom is like the apple to the tree.

The mycelium, an underground route like system that branches out kind of like the internet connecting plants and trees to each other.

You got a couple of problems here.

A no light be smaller than the eye can see.

It's only one cell thick.

So what we did was we use scanning electron microscopic photography for the electron microscope to work.

They work in a lab on a giant slab of concrete because any vibration would ruin the shot.

You take the specimen and you put it under the microscope and you bombarded with electrons and you get most extraordinary close of detail that is unimaginable to the human eye.

And we use those images as a reference for computer generated animators to use and we created these incredible shots of traveling through the mycelium network.

Throughout his career, Louis has pushed the envelope of our visual language, both in terms of tech and artistry.

He also pioneered the stock footage industry.

The company he formed to license his vast library of clips was eventually bought by Getty Images.

I started shooting time lapse four decades ago by looking at time lapse clouds back in 1970 when I pioneered the 1st 35 millimeter cameras that could go outdoors and shoot one frame at a time shooting fungi and flowers and plants.

I basically have a camera rolling 24 hours a day, seven days a week from commercials to imax two feature films.

It's impossible to not have seen the work of Louie Schwartzberg at some point in your life.

I love to film hummingbirds again.

Looking at life from their point of view enables you to realize that all of life has a different metabolic rate and I think all of life has a different frame rate.

So, for example, a mosquito on your arm, you know, having a little drop of blood, takes a look at that hand coming towards it in ultra slow motion and has plenty of time to take off because its metabolic rate.

It's lifespan is way shorter than our lifespan and our lifespan is way shorter than the redwood trees lifespan.

This reality of, you know, real time.

Human point of view is not the only point of view and that's really the beauty of cameras and time lapse cinematography.

It's actually a time machine.

And you know, you can talk about this stuff in scientific terms, You get to have Einstein explained the theory of relativity, but until you see it, you really don't get it.

The longest thing I've ever shot was a mouse rotting.

You can say that decomposition is the end of life.

I argued that it's the beginning of life.

You see this kind of rippling of the for and then that kind of dissipates.

And then you see some bones and then you see the grass grow up in between to observe the pattern and the rhythm of how it decomposes is actually really beautiful Louise.

Art has given him a unique perspective on nature time and the nature of time.

What I'm really engaged with is really trying to understand the intelligence of nature and how we can live in harmony with it.

And that means at times using time lapse camera to be able to observe it in their time frame.

It's a shared economy under the ground where nutrients and food are shared for ecosystems to flourish without greed.

And I personally believe that should be the model for how we should live our lives.

We should take that wisdom from below the ground and bring it above the ground.

Yeah.