The Timelapse Photographer's Fear of Mortality

first published in Markings

The last 500,000,000 years: Continents suffer brake failure, crash and buckle. Scotland is a raft adrift on the equator, towing Greenland. It floats on a tide of rock, while the Iapetus Ocean between what will be them and what will be us shrinks to a small sea to a strait to a river to a burn to a trickle somewhere round by Hexham, and on dry days isn’t even there. Mountains and valleys rise, fall, crumple, like the folds of a heavy tweed cloth. We dock. Forests blanket the ground and turn to coal. The earth spins, and if you could hear the note it makes, you’d hear an E flat — the music of this sphere.
David: Is this the kind of thing? I’d suggest intercutting the animation with real footage — slo-mo crumpling cloth, puddles on moving black polythene etc, i.e. to show it’s a world we KNOW, if you just factor in (time-)scale.

The last 250,000,000 years: Eildon erupts, dribbles from its guts the stuff of hills. The hills grow, subside, grow, subside, with the bubble of mudbaths. The volcanoes sputter and snuff, die, are scoured flat by ice. The desert drowns in a tropical sea.
D: Slo-mo hot mudbath (close-up). Timelapse: Rocky pool freezing over (stock — I have this) and maybe a rock-polishing sequence for the erosion (? at a pinch, could do Blue-Peter style with different-stage samples. Or animate. NB Dinosaurs! Whack ‘em in! Any excuse! But not solid — ethereal. Like insects/ghosts).

The last 1,000,000 years: Icescape melts to reveal the tips of rocks, a glacier thunders down the Teviot Valley, bulldozing the land to make a thoroughfare for the river it will melt into. The earth inhales, its greyness suffusing with green.
D: Plenty glacial stock. Timelapse: Ice melting from rock (Bernese Oberland — mine, scale totally ambiguous; also have various bare-soil-to-crop sequences — could be tinted. Or locusts un-eating a field. Can get hold of quarry stuff)

The last 1,000 years: Settlements spread like melanoma, crawl across land, hoovering forest. Cathedrals bud, park and powder. Families take root in the land and fence it with wars, drop litters of children that fence it with green.
Not sure. Ant-hills? Termites? Or something colourful in a Petri dish? Mould? Fencing easy to arrange. And there’s a brilliant field patchwork taken somewhere in Kent — spring through autumn.

The last 100 years: Roads sprout, divide, and join. The land is veined with road. Rivers rise and fall, spread, shrink. Plugs are pulled from wetlands; they become fields. Valleys fill with water and become lochs. The air thickens and darkens above the towns, which blink orange at night.
Night above Rio — like an on-off switch. Police siren/light thing. No prob. Roads: Back to micro stuff, I think. Will inquire.

The last 10 years: Cities crawl east and westward, sucking up villages in their path. Fields flicker with changing crop colours. Yellow, bright, rape. Summer sneezing reaches epidemic proportions.
Mercury? You know how it stays in blobs and suddenly joins up? Eats the smaller blobs?
Me — I went to London, worked, shagged James/Carl/Steve, processed food and smoke and booze through my body, painted my front room white then peach then yellow, beetled up and down the roads, sometimes took off into the air for a short breath of elsewhere. Married Steve — whirlwind of white — divorced and found another room to paint yellow then green then eggshell.

The last year: Met Joe. Shagged, moved in, shagged, ordered pizza down the phone, drank small bottles of beer, shagged, worried when I missed a period and cried when I bled. So did Joe. Good, fine Joe. Painted the room ‘hint of yellow’ together. Getting more subtle in old age.
Koyaanisqatsi territory, almost.

The last week: Ate, drank, slept, and finished editing sequence for “The Twelve Seasons”. Found a lump and saw the doctor. He stuck a needle in and gouged out some tissue. Gouged. Bastard.

The last day: Doctor’s. Mammograph tomorrow. Sat in front of telly all day watching daytime stuff. Clarissa: I always think Sachertorte is ruined by that layer of apricot jam. Always? Sachertorte on my mind. A woman with dyed hair said her husband loved his ferrets more than her. Project: dyed hair growing back? C/U and head shot? Or shaved head? Sprouting hairs like grass shoots. ‘Black wires’. Or a person, young-to-old. Smooth-small to sagging. Need to start now. Train apprentice for the later years. Or thin to fat lady. Forcefeed like a goose, over months/years. Or film self? Too late. Sagging has set in already.


Jen. Where are you? Everyone’s worried sick. Give me a ring. Are you at work? Please. And good news about the film. David called. He wants a copy of the new treatment. Should I send him your notes? Just let me know where you are, eh? Love you.


Dear Joe:
OK, this is the score. Sorry to be difficult. Am fucked. Am calling it Dennis, in homage to Dennis Potter, who called his Rupert, in homage etc etc. They want to lop a bit off. Amazon. Maybe I can get a part in Xena Warrior Princess, lad’s wet dream, wear leather etc etc. Joke. Anyway. I need to be on my own for a bit (Garbo — drama queen). Want to finish snowdrops SO DON’T TOUCH THE CAMERAS. And tell David to go shag himself. As if he’ll ever get funding. I love you.

Jen xxx



OK Jen. Are you there? Are you listening to this? Don’t you just hate those shits who listen to their messages and don’t lift? Jen? OK then. Got your note. Don’t know what to say. Love you. That’s all. Love you. And come home. It’s cold without you. Crap. It’s shite without you. Come home this instant or the snowdrops get it. Love – you. Don’t do this.


Dear Joe,
Thanks. Feeling OK. Dennis fine too. Still not sure about lop-off. We’re attached. Or I’m attached. He’s a hanger-on. Parasite. Like mistletoe. You’d think you could take it off, shake it out like a cup. Dice. Wipe out gunge with a finger and replace. But no — it means more gouging. Need to think. Snowdrops growing fine — shoots about 1” now. Home — not yet. Will get back. You understand. At least, I hope you understand. Assumptions. Love you lots.

Jen xxxxx <---extra ones


Jen. Hi. What can I say? More to point — what can I do? People are asking for you. I don’t know what to tell them. Some cards here. Don’t want to open them. I want to talk. “It’s good to talk”, and all that. I don’t understand why you’re doing this. Feeling a bit crap. In the sense of useless. And crap as in crap as well. Joe. That’s me. Remember me? Love you.


Dear Joe,
Ha bloody ha. Very funny. Next time you pass through, remember not to wear those fucking huge docs. Made a huge footprint — 10 or so frames until I caught it. AND IT SHOWS. To me, anyway. Don’t fuck it up for me, please. Skulking around like a spectre. I thought you were a cloud until I looked in freezeframe. It’s not video, you know. No sound. No point in speaking. Your mouth was all mushy. And your hair needs cut. And I’m still thinking about the lopfest cos apparently it won’t do much good and what’s the point of going titless into the good night? Sorry — no maudlin stuff. It’s fairly straightforward, actually. To lop or not to lop? Like snipping out a frame. Like you, matey-ghost — cutting room floor for you. Though of course there’s no cutting room floor, just a cutting room void where all the bad frames go to roost in pixel limbo. Don’t worry — I kept you somewhere. In my heart. In my hard drive. Easy to get confused. Love you.

Jen xxxx


Me again. You can’t hide forever, you know. I have friends in high places. David, actually. I sent him your outline. Any objections — tough. And any credit — mine. Cos you’re written off, right? Cos what’s the point of timelapse without time? Fair enough, Jen — spend it with your bloody snowdrops instead of me, cos they can comfort you and help you in ways I am obviously too crap and cackhanded to manage, and are no doubt far less boring to talk to. This is getting stupid.


Dear Joe,
I want to finish something. Can you understand that? Just another week. To feel finished. Don’t want to stop doing things. Then the Lop (sounds like a new dance). Yes, sirree. They’ve booked me in. Bye bye Dennis. It’s been whatever. And I’ve spoken to David. He wants a treatment, lists and costings for the archive stuff. And I’ve bought some paint. For the bedroom. Blue. Sort of deep Blue Blue as in Klein. Thought I could roll around in it and rub myself up against the walls. So you see I’ve got to come back. And cos I love you, incidentally. In fact, mainly that. But I didn’t want you to see me being crap. Cos I’m crap at this. Hugs (blue-smeared).

Jen


Jen. Fuck off. Joe.


David:
Here’s the next bit as discussed.

Now: A woman is sitting at a keyboard typing this. Symbiotic things — Dennis, bacteria, maybe viruses and fungi (who knows?) — lead small lives in the habitat of her body. Elsewhere, volcanoes are erupting and mountains growing imperceptibly as the continents collide. The noise of the creak of everything is E flat, if you had ears to hear it. Everything has a note.
(Stock) Snowdrops stretch upward toward the sun, unfurl. The snowdrops move, circle with the sunpath, dance the dance. A man looking like Joe appears suddenly and sits. He flickers. He’s there until the snowdrops wilt.

The next day: Wars — big, small, on scales we can’t imagine. Planes land and take off like bees. A One-Day Fly emerges, breeds, dies — all mayfly life is there, in the space between dawn and dusk. They live so fast, they’re dead by night. They live a long, slow brightening and a long, slow sundown — never the blink of days.
Slo-mo: We are so SLOW! Need to grind things nearly to a halt so that we can see them. To mayflies, we are lumbering monoliths. (Stock) Redwood forest, Canada, tree POV looking down, timelapse: people picnic around its ankles, play frisbee. Quick and insubstantial as flies.

The next week: More of same. Eat, drink, sleep. The rhythm of commuting is the rhythm of breathing. In-out.
Koyaanisqatsi territory, almost.

The next year: As above. Cities crawl. Roads join. Neon blinks: night-day-night-day-night-day. Sun blinks (in reverse): day-night-day-night-day-night. Trees grow another ring.

The next 100,000 years: Ice thunders down the Teviot Valley, etc etc (see above). Huge slump in world fridge market.
Glacial stock.

The next 10,000,000 years: (approximately). India crashes into Asia, the Himalayas shoot higher and higher. Crumpled cloth.
Slo-mo. Tweed? Polythene?

The next 4,000,000,000 years: Sea evaporates to desert as sun balloons and reddens. A small asteroid the size of a town hits home. A huge asteroid the size of a marble.