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Fractal Time lapses www.julius-horsthuis.com rendered in Mandelbulb3d music: 'Within' by Michael Stearns
BACKGROUND
I had been playing with the idea of doing fractal time lapses for a while, but the idea sparked again after seeing the movie Baraka, of which I did a blog post. The slow moving camera and change of light, with sometimes long shadows moving over an epic or beautiful structure seemed profound to me. I discarded the idea of the fractals themselves to morph, as I thought this would diminish the feel that these were actual landscapes. I did do the morphing landscape with time-lapse clouds in "Everything From Above". This was different in that I used no clouds moving, only too-perfect sunny skies, with a good amount of mist, created by heavy diffusion along the z-buffer. The second vista also contains volume lights, which is a feature I hadn't used yet. The huge extra time on rendering doesn't weigh up to the mildly improved look.
My original idea was to use a lot of lens-flares and other artifacts to make it more realistic. But I found that the tranquil and sterile look worked better with the music, which I took from Michael Stearns. Later, it has been re-scored on my request by Italian composer Giovanni di Bernardo.
When Reuters picked up on this piece and wanted to publish it, they had wrongly interpreted the dictionary quote in the beginning of the film, thinking I meant to 'visualize' what the earth looked like billions of years ago. Obviously, I don't actually believe that it is possible to do with this technique, and my choices have been aesthetic ones exclusively.
This is the same piece, re-scored by Di Bernardo: