Frans Lanting:
A Journey Through Time
Conjuring Worlds
One of Lanting’s greatest challenges was evoking worlds that no longer exist. “Long before there were plants and animals,” he explains, “the living world was dominated by bacteria that built primitive reefs. They were photosynthetic life forms, and in fact they created the oxygen that has become the basis for Earth’s atmosphere.”
Frans Lanting. Photo by Paul Schraub.
Lanting went to the only place left in the world — a remote lagoon in Australia — where these particular bacteria still exist in numbers and managed to create the photographic conditions that made it look like a world from two billion years ago.
On his final return to his meticulous, white-walled studio and gallery in Santa Cruz, Lanting first built the visual narrative of nearly 300 images for “Life: A Journey Through Time.” Then he began his unique collaboration with Philip Glass and Alexander Nichols, former lighting director for the American Ballet Theater who choreographed Lanting’s images to Glass’s orchestral score.
Fitting Pieces of Glass
For the orchestration, Glass worked with colleague Michael Riesman, who arranged Glass’s music to Lanting’s visual story. Riesman has two Grammy nominations as conductor of Glass’s film soundtracks and other works and is best known as the pianist on the soundtrack of the film “The Hours.” He also has been a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble since 1974.
Riesman found appropriate music for the images, but some of Glass’s compositions were only four or five minutes long and didn’t match the length of the storyboard sections, which were eight to ten minutes long.
“I didn’t want to start arbitrarily adding repeats or expanding things,” Riesman says, “so I decided to put together a medley or pastiche of different pieces of source music. Then I was off and running.”
Riesman made demo tapes from Glass’s existing live performances, recorded MIDI piano tracks of the music that he was going to use, sequenced the new music in Digital Performer, and edited the material in Pro Tools on his Power Mac G5.
“I have a collection of G5s, G4s, PowerBooks, even a G3 with two DigiDesign cards,” Riesman confesses. “I run Digital Performer on an upgraded G4 and record into a Pro Tools system that’s a quad G5.”
Riesman sent Lanting QuickTime tracks of the score so he and Nichols could sequence Lanting’s images to harmonize with the music. Nichols choreographed the images to the music using Adobe After Effects on his Power Mac G5.
Creating a Visual Ballet
“I’ve worked in scenery and lighting for dance and ballet companies my whole career,” Nichols says, “so I put my ballet sensibilities into motion here in the visual sense.”
First Nichols listened to the score to get a feel for its scope, and then approached it sequentially in the editing. “For section one — ‘Elements,’ the geology of the earth — I started breaking down the score on paper and making hard choices about where I would be doing imagery,” he says. “But I found that, once I started getting into the editing, I had to work more emotionally, along with the music.”
Using layers in After Effects, Nichols panned across some of the images so landscapes intersected with birds appearing to fly, fish swimming, and jellies floating to the measures of Glass’s music.
Nichols made the visual composition three screens wide. He worked in standard 640-by-480 video resolution — “Frans’s photography can stand up to that,” he says — because the final assembled work would be 1920 pixels wide, fine enough to see minute details in a microbe.
“The Mac was the only thing that made it possible for me to finish the project in time,” Nichols adds. “When you have 80 or 90 images in an eight-minute segment, and you have two or three layers that are all panning and moving and changing scale, each frame takes a significant time to render. My quad G5 did it in three hours a screen.”
A Personal Commitment
In a way, “Life: A Journey Through Time” consolidates much of what Lanting has accomplished in 25 years of traveling around the world portraying wild creatures as ambassadors for the preservation of complete ecosystems.
“I feel a great commitment to covering the important environmental issues of our time,” Lanting says. “Even in an age when most people get their information from moving images, I think there’s a special power to a photographic image if it’s well composed and well thought out and if it means something.
“Combining images with music has been a wonderful experience,” he adds. “Both of them are abstract languages. There’s no reason why anyone should feel moved emotionally by music, because they’re just vibrations. There’s no reason why anyone should feel moved by images because they’re just colors and shapes. But the right combination can create a very powerful experience.”
