For Tom, timelapse started out as a hobby. Braving the conditions, he would camp out in places such as Yosemite, or Joshua Tree National Park, shooting the night sky, then editing the footage and uploading short films to Vimeo.com. People started to take notice, with some of his Vimeo videos racking up hundreds of thousands of views. Simultaneously, Lowe launched the Timescapes.org forum, the largest community of timelapse shooters on the internet, which has grown to over 5,000 members.
This led to a chance encounter on the internet with New Zealand composer and entrepreneur Nigel “John” Stanford. After a brief email conversation, “TimeScapes” the movie was born, with Stanford agreeing to fund the movie and provide Tom with a 4K Red MX digital cinema camera, while Canon USA sponsored the film by providing Lowe with 5.6K 5D Mark II DSLRs and lenses.
Production involved many hardships. Tom slept outdoors for 250 nights, sleeping on cots (without tents) under the stars next to his camera, while timelapse was being captured. During the middle of principle photography on “TimeScapes”, Lowe won the Astronomy Photographer of the year award in 2011, with the above image, 'Blazing Bristlecone' - featuring a 4,000-year-old bristlecone pine tree against the Milky Way. Unbeknownst to the judges, the photo was actually just one frame of a time-lapse movie, which is featured in “TimeScapes”, the movie.
During production, two trailers were released, which went on to gather over 3 million views.
TimeScapes was shot in 5K resolution on Red Epic and Canon DLSR cameras, edited in 4K in Adobe Premiere and After Effects, and graded at 16-bit 4K at Light Iron Hollywood on a Quantel Pablo system, by colorist Ian Vertovec (“Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”,“Social Network”).
