- [Narrator] The new to Netflix documentary,
"Fantastic Fungi,"
features amazing time-lapse footage filmed by a team
of cinematographers that included this pioneering filmmaker.
- My name is Louie Schwartzberg.
I'm a filmmaker and I love
to take audiences on journeys through time and scale.
That's a real rush.
- [Narrator] Let's go behind the scenes
and find out how these time-lapses were made
for "Fantastic Fungi."
- Well, I think the biggest surprise
for people watching the film is they think
that it's all filmed outdoors.
There's a lot of reasons why you can't film time-lapse
of plants and fungi outdoors.
Number one, there's wind,
which should make the objects shake and rattle,
and look like a Charlie Chaplin movie.
Number two,
there are bugs and other elements
that would interfere with the filming.
The has to be constant.
You know, even during the day, the light fluctuates.
So I built a studio on top of my garage.
If I was shooting one frame every 15 minutes,
it means I'm shooting four frames an hour times 24
is 96 frames.
96 frames is four seconds of film.
So the way it works is I had somebody build
an intervalometer for me.
Intervalometer means it triggers a 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.
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.
I'm able to program the grow lights
to be like sunrise and sunset.
If I leave the grow 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 ooh,
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 the composition is going to look like tomorrow,
or two days from now,
or a week from now.
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.
If you're wrong,
it means you just gotta do it all over again.
- [Narrator] Louie and his team consulted mycologists,
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 had these little kind
of tiny tentacles that would emerge
They would wiggle in this really beautiful
wave-like pattern.
I 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 the closeup 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 Canon,
180 millimeter Canon,
and the 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 used 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,
they took 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 in 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.
- [Narrator] 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.
- [Narrator] The mycelium,
an underground root-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.
B, smaller than the eye can see.
It's only one cell thick.
So what we did was we used
scanning electron microscopic photography
for the electron microscope to work.
They work in a lab on a giant slab of concrete
'cause any vibration would ruin the shot.
You take the specimen and you put it under the microscope
and you bombard it with electrons,
and you get most extraordinary close-up detail
that is unimaginable to the human eye.
We used those images as a reference
for computer generated animators to use
and we created these incredible shots
of traveling through the mycelial network.
- [Narrator] Throughout his career,
Louie 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 first 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.
- [Narrator] From commercials, to IMAX, to 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,
it 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,
its lifespan is way shorter than our lifespan,
and our lifespan is way shorter
than a redwood tree's 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.
You know, you can talk about this stuff in scientific terms,
you could have Einstein explain 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 argue that it's the beginning of life.
You see this kind of rippling of the fur
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.
- [Narrator] Louie's 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.
That means at times using a time-lapse camera
to be able to observe it in their timeframe.
It's a shared economy under the ground where nutrients
and food are shared for ecosystems
to flourish without greed.
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.