Travel

BEAUTIFUL CITY DREAMS

Still from Moments in China by Ryan Emond.

by Ryan Emond. Still from Moments in China.

When you think of a dream trip, is it likely to be a tropical paradise? An exotic locale? A luxurious treat? Maybe. But filmmaker Ryan Emond takes cities we know well and turns them into dreamscapes in these time lapse videos.

MOMENTS IN CHINA

Moments in China is a collection of vivid moments that Emond experienced while traveling around China recently. The piece flows from Hong Kong to Beijing, and visits Guilin, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.

The soundtrack features the song Blue Horse by Sa Ding Ding.

“I hope that I can give you a brief glimpse of the beauty, and motivate you to come explore for yourself,” says Emond.

It takes Emond about 5 hours to film each 7-second sequence in his videos because they each consist of 400 to 900 high quality photos. A 4-minute video can take months to complete.

See the Moments in China video here.

TORONTO

Emond created several time-lapse videos of Toronto, including Toronto Tempo, City Rising, and Planet Toronto.

Some of the most beautiful scenes in Toronto Tempo show the sun rising over downtown, a subway rushing from station to station, and the Rogers Centre roof sliding shut, all snippets of the Toronto everyday experience, elevated to a surreal state.

Emond was Inspired by his personal travels and popular documentaries like Planet Earth. “I’d watch the various episodes for hours, developing my shooting style from what I saw,” he explains.

“By utilizing time-lapse photography and slow motion to capture intimate moments, I was able to draw attention to what we might overlook, or only offer a passing glance to,” Emond explains.

Clouds move, rolling with the air currents, changing the light as they change shape as Toronto unfurls. “I want to represent how we move through the city,” says Emond, “how the weather moves through it and how the city breathes, transforms and grows each day.”

The effect is other-worldly. The Rodgers Center looks like a spaceship. The skyline looks like a scene from another galaxy.

Emond was commissioned by the City of Toronto to shoot and edit a video documenting the installation of Ai Weiwei's Forever Bicycles for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche.

“As a cinematographer and time-lapse photographer, I am devoted to capturing scenes that effectively portray the beauty of matter in motion – I strive to make the viewer feel the pulse of each shot,” says Emond.

The video begins, showing 3,144 bicycles, stacked in a pile, 100 feet in length and 30 feet high in Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square. We see Wei Wei’s vision take shape, as Emond's slow motion time-lapse technique makes the whole process seem like a dream.

VANCOUVER

In Ryan Emond's most recent work, he spent six weeks, taking more than 20,000 photographs of downtown Vancouver. He climbed high, to take shots of the traffic below.

After a minute of surveying people, wildlife, and skyline, the video follows one man as he carefully climbs the Lions Gate Bridge.

“Flowing from the ground to the top of the Lions Gate Bridge, I aim to show you an unseen view,” says Emond. He used a dolly rig that he built himself, with a motorized head that could slowly track objects on the cityscape over several hours.

MYANMAR, THAILAND, VIETNAM, CHINA

Trading Nirvana documents Emond's recent adventure through East Asia. Most of these scenes take place in Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and China.

In this film, he focused on shooting interesting situations and narratives vs solely on the scenery. He aimed to create a collection of meaningful experiences within everyday situations.

Emond experimented with different filming techniques, augmenting his shots by playing them both backwards and forwards, sped up and slowed down, to add emotion and bring the viewer ever deeper into a dreamlike experience of each place.

Read more about Beautiful Dreams, as they relate to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact including Building Dreams Now, Kepler’s Dream Beautifully Resurrected Now, 10 Beautiful Ice Cream Dreams Now and Looks Like a Dream Now.

Enter your own images and ideas about Beautiful Dream in this week’s creative Photo Competition. Open for entries now until 11:59 p.m. PT on 09.07.14. If you are reading this after that date, check out the current BN Creative Competition, and enter!