Not any Colour
"I thought while I was in Dubai, perhaps he might meet with me and discuss his work and maybe give me some idea about the best places to shoot my time-lapse. Well, Sebastian gets approaches like this all of the time and will only make time to see serious professionals. Fortunately, he did meet with me and really showed me Dubai in a way that nobody else could have."
"Sebastian took me all over Dubai and show me where all the best shooting locations were. Every night we would hit the road with all of our camera gear and 3 litres of water, and walk up and down the streets of the city. The biggest difficulty was merely getting around in the heat of the evenings and the need to carry a lot of liquid to keep me going. Dubai is seriously hot and even at 2am in the morning it is still very, very hot!"
"So here we were climbing up and down the tallest buildings we could find, looking for the best vantage point to shoot from. These night photo sessions with Sebastian, lasted from about 7pm to about 3am every night for the whole two weeks I was working in Dubai."
"A few weeks later, I happened to be back to Dubai, where I teamed up with Sebastian once more. For another three weeks we hit the night streets, again shooting even more time-lapse footage. ‘Not any Colour’ actually represents five solid weeks of shooting 7 hours every night. In total, I shot something in the region of 100,000 stills; which were all 4K in size. This was by no means a small project by any definition.”
"I then used LR Time-lapse and Adobe Lightroom to post this project. LR Time-lapse is a great tool because it lets me access the key frames to modify the exposure values. When I wanted to modify the colors of my roadway shots and flip the hue from orange to red, I used lR Time-Lapse. Where things started to become more complicated was the color removal of the backgrounds. To achieve this, I went into every 4K image and then started to paint things out by hand. This was not a quick project and in the end it actually took nine months to complete 'Not any Colour’."
"After I finished my rough edit, I then work with a musician in Karachi, Pakistan, who creates my music score. I usually edit to an offline piece of music and then send it to Athar Saeed via dropbox, whereby he then writes me a custom score that I use to retime the edit."
"My Dubai series of films opened up a whole new world of collaborations for me. After spending time with Sebastian Opitz, he then introduced me to Daniel Cheong, who is this absolutely phenomenal photographer of world standing. I was then introduced to Karim Nafatni or ‘GostRidr,’ who is another great photographer. So before I knew it, I was immersed in a community of some of Dubai's best talents. However, I guess the biggest collaborator of all, was the city of Dubai, who put on such an amazing show for me."
