[Exclusive] A Timeless Desert Gets Captured in Layer-Lapse

The inventor of the layer-lapse, Julian Tryba, has turned his gaze to the wild Southwest for his next deconstructed nature film, Timeless Dreams.

Tryba made his signature technique famous on the Boston skyline by collaging timelapse footage from different parts of the day in a single frame. Timeless Dreams similarly dissects the badlands of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California, stitching them into a blue, red, brown, and yellow quilt of shifting rock and sky.

“I wanted to try a new challenge with the layer-lapse technique,” Tryba tells The Creators Project. “Cities are much more conducive for showing day-to-night transitions because all the lights pop on at night. Cities also consist mostly of straight lines, which makes it much easier to process layer-lapses… In post production, working with jagged landscapes was somewhat time intensive, but I made it work.”

Aside from the drawbacks, there were below-freezing temperatures, vicious winds, snowstorms, and Tryba’s collaborator, Mike Sutton, got stung by a scorpion. That sounds like a nightmare, but Tryba simply says, “Moving from the city where I am more comfortable shooting into nature was a welcome challenge.” 

Check out the fruit of their labor, as well as some behind the scenes shots that reveal the Southwestern desert, sans layer-lapsing, below.

Images courtesy the artist

See more of Julian Tryba and Mike Sutton‘s work on their websites.

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