How Mushroom Time-Lapses Are Filmed

[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.