Take a drive from the desert into Las Vegas at night and the city bursts out of nowhere like a gigantic, kaleidoscopic light bulb. This mass electrification in the middle of nowhere makes the city, more so than any others, a real visual oddity, one uniquely 'Vegas.Filmmaker Philip Bloom has another way of viewing Sin City—a surreal cinematic study through infrared. Using a hardware modified Sony RX100 IV camera (hacked by Life Pixel) with the infrared blocking filter removed, Bloom shot Las Vegas at 250 frames-per-second (fps) in two-second burst mode with a 665 nm (infrared) filter. The visuals are mostly in-camera, but Bloom also did some color work with Film Convert.
Advertisement
“I picked up the camera in Las Vegas a week before… [t]here was no plan, I had just got the camera and with any new toy you get excited and use it a lot,” Bloom explains in a blog post on Las Vegas in Infrared. “Whilst shooting it though I realized just how well it worked there with the palm trees and lawns and deep blue skies. The results, especially in slow motion, made Vegas look somewhat sinister and with a post-apocalyptic vibe.”“That was seven weeks ago almost and I am still using it almost every day,” he adds. “Every now and then I get asked Why? or What’s the point? Well, there isn’t ‘a point’ as such. These are my experimentations and I find infrared fascinating.”Though Bloom sees this slowed-down, infrared Las Vegas as post-apocalyptic, it really looks quite a bit more alien. The familiar scenery has somehow become completely unfamiliar—a looking glass version of the ultimate unreal city.
ORIGINAL REPORTING ON EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS IN YOUR INBOX.
By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy & to receive electronic communications from Vice Media Group, which may include marketing promotions, advertisements and sponsored content.
