Project 16 of 17
Sunrise Hike
Cities & Places · Alberta foothills
Alberta foothills. Six takes. One hour, thirty-three minutes.
Sunrise Hike is a drone film made at dawn on a grass summit in the Alberta foothills, and it starts before the sun does.
The first take rolled eight minutes and twelve seconds before the camera found the sun: mountains to the west under cloud lit pink from beneath, a braided river below. Then the sun, a red disc just clear of the eastern ridges, held for fifty-three seconds without a cut. An hour later, a footpath through the grass. Last, the summit itself: grass, a weathered post, the valley beyond. Atom2Adam Studio lit nothing. The blue hour, the ridge, the sun, the trail, the summit.
- Subject
- A sunrise hike to a grass summit in the Alberta foothills — mountains to the west, lower ridges stepping down into haze to the east — before the sun.
- Intent
- Make the hour before sunrise feel like somewhere you want to be.
- Seen
- A grass crest with two small pines; a braided river on the valley floor; spruce along the ridge; the sun as a red disc clearing the far ridges; a footpath worn into the grass; a weathered post lying in the summit grass.
- Made
- Four takes from our drone across the morning, cut into four films and eight frames. Nothing lit.
I
The hour before
Blue hour: mountains to the west, the cloud lit from underneath.
Here is the first thing worth knowing about this film: the sun is not in it yet. The first take rolled eight minutes and twelve seconds before the camera caught the sun on the horizon — well inside civil twilight, which the U.S. Naval Observatory says begins “when the center of the Sun is geometrically 6 degrees below the horizon.” That is why nothing in the frame casts a hard shadow. The only light is the sky.
Twenty-four seconds, from the crest out to the valley.
Two small pines on the crest.
Eight minutes before the sun, the drone was already up.
II
The ridge
Spruce along the ridge, the river far below.
Stand on this summit and the country splits in two. Behind the camera, mountains. In front of it the ridges step down, lower and lower, into haze — and that, the next take proves, is the side the sun comes up on. Between the two, a braided river lays its pale gravel bars along the valley floor.
Fourteen seconds along the ridge, at half speed.
The river bends away into the haze.
III
The sun
The sun on the eastern edge, red through the haze.
The U.S. Naval Observatory defines sunrise as the moment “the upper edge of the disk of the Sun is on the horizon.” Up here the horizon is a line of ridges, and the drone found the sun just clear of the last one: a pink-red circle, perfectly round in the haze. The take runs fifty-three seconds without a cut. The camera drifts over the ridges; the sun stays exactly where it is.
Sixteen seconds of it, at half speed.
IV
The trail
A footpath through the grass, up to the trees.
One hour, six minutes and one second later by the same camera's clock, the colour has climbed up into the cloud, and the drone finds the only line on this ridge that anybody made: a footpath worn through the grass, curving up to the aspens. The spruce, the aspen crowns and the hills going blue into the distance were all here first.
Thirteen seconds along the path, at half speed.
Aspen crowns, and the hills going blue.
V
The summit
The summit: grass, a weathered post, the valley beyond.
The view is the reason to climb.
Detail → Whole
Sunrise Hike ends. 17 projects in the collection.
