Richard Bentley
"I guess I can trace my interest in time-lapse back to when I was boy. The spark first came by way of my dad, who had this clockwork 16mm film camera, which I used to do stop motion of my bionic man climbing our back fence."
"I was right into painting and design, so I studied art, philosophy and psychology while I was at school. However, I figured that if I did an art degree at college, then there was every chance that I may not get a job. So in the end, I went to an engineering university that also had a film and television program. I studied a combination of computer programming and software engineering along with film and TV production."
"I had been offered a few places to study in London. In the end, it was a toss up between Goldsmiths University which is a lot more creative and film orientated, or Brunel, which was far more focused on engineering. Brunel just so happened to offer onsite student accommodation for the entire of first year, and given that I had neither cash or a job, this seemed the safest option. Then during my final two years at Brunel, I ended up training many of the lecturers about video editing. This has now turned out to be a recurring theme in my career!”
"After I finished my degree, I met a women and followed her to Denmark. For those who have been to Copenhagen, they will know that accommodation there is very, very hard to come by. So for the first three months, I basically had to crash on the kitchen floor of someone’s apartment until we got our own apartment. This apartment also involved the tenant being the janitor, for all fifty apartments in the block! So while I was playing part-time janitor, I was also studying a Masters degree in computer science, doing an intensive Danish language course and raising two children for good measure. It was a hectic time."
“One of the guys I was study my Masters degree with, happened to be a freelance camera operator with TVS. This network was Denmark’s first privatized fee paying sports channel, owned by Danish soccer legend, Preben Elkjær. So when my friend came to me one day and asked if I fancied doing a bit of work on the side, I jumped at it. I freelanced for the first three months before it became a full-time job, by which time I gave up studying to go into a career in broadcast. I worked for them for about a year, until everyone worked out how to decrypt the set-top-box and avoided the subscription fee."
"Luckily for me, when the TVS failed, I managed to walk straight into a job at Denmark Radio as their transmission director. I was responsible for outputting the entire 12 hours of their equivalent of BBC One and BBC Two for the next five years!”
"What I miss most about living in Copenhagen is the people. Because everyone lives in apartments, when the sun does come out everyone comes out to the grassed areas and they all sit down and just talk. There is such a terrific sense of community in Denmark, which makes up for the cold winters.”
"When I came back home to live in Nottingham after 7 years in Denmark, I walk straight into a job with BBC One - East Midland Today. As the Regional Station Assistant, I was doing everything from ingesting all of the media and directing the news bulletins, to location directing a gardening program. I was then re-trained as a video journalist and lucky enough to be picked to then train all of the other VJs around the UK!”
"I then joined the BBC’s regional training team and helped roll-out newsrooms across the whole of the UK. I was basically spending three or four months on site, each time we rolled one out. I did this for the BBC for about two years before joining ITV. Again, I was rolling out big complex newsrooms and responsible for training the journalists, editors and management. After implementing so many newsrooms, many of which included Avid kit, Avid finally invited me to go and work for them."
"Over the last seven and half years, I have been to at least 200 TV stations and post houses. It was my job to custom design the best workflow for anyone purchasing a large installation from Avid. So this was a very interesting job that has taken me all across Europe, the US and the Middle East."
"At my heart though, I am still a creative individual and I really needed an outlet for that. I was thinking one day, here I am training all of these people to be creative and yet I am doing nothing about it myself. I had just bought a Canon 7D when someone asked me if I had seen Phillip Bloom's website. While I was looking at Phillip’s time-lapse work, I then happened across Tom Lowe’s work from Timescapes - and my jaw just hit the floor!”
"After seeing Tom’s work, I just felt compelled to give time-lapse a go. Then while I was on a trip to Dubai two years ago, I did my first time lapse using JPEG, so that I could edit it on my Avid Media Composer. I didn’t have anything that could handle RAW back then. After I sold my Canon 7D for a full frame Canon 5D Mark II, I then scraped some cash together for a decent lens. I have a 24mm L series prime and what I do is to rent a 24mm tilt shift and an 8mm fish eye as I need them."
"Now that I am shooting in RAW, I have had to build a computer from scratch to be able to handle the thousands of 4K images I work with. I use LR Time-lapse and Adobe Lightroom to post all of my projects. LR Time-lapse lets me access the key frames to modify the exposure values. I can do adjustments by purely modifying the key frame values using LR Timelapse and then re-export the images back into Adobe Lightroom. So when that is done, I then bring in my RAW images into Adobe After Effects to typically create 10sec movies, which I then edit to make my project.”
“Once I have finished editing, I work with a musician in Karachi, Pakistan who creates my music score. I usually edit to an offline piece of music and then send my composer the video and audio files via dropbox, whereby Athar Saeed then writes me a custom score which I use to retime the edit.”
"For me, time-lapse is all encompassing. It is where I focus all of my free time on researching and learning more about this art form. Although I have achieved strong interest in my creative work, I really do feel like my journey has only just begun."