  Plants will do almost anything for strong, steady light. Trees grow taller and taller, lifting their leaves closer to the sun. Shrubs and vines growing beneath the leaf canopy don't have that luxury. Living in the shadow of their towering neighbors, they must satisfy their thirst for light in other ways. For the creeper, or climber, plants captured in Life, that means clambering up any nearby object, like their green neighbors.
The filmmakers from Life set out to capture the climbing behavior of three vines — Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata), cat's claw creeper (Macfadyena unguis-cati) and the passion flower (Passiflora spp.) — bent on reaching the sun. Even for the aggressive creepers, scaling great distances up the side of tree can take weeks, even months. The only realistic way to film that journey is with time-lapse photography. Why was getting that footage one of the biggest challenges the Life filmmakers faced over the entire series?
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Watch "Creeper Plants Climb Trees"
LIGHTING THE NIGHT, DIMMING THE DAY
The climbing weapons of choice for Boston ivy are tendrils armed with seemingly innocuous, little adhesive disks. The plant relies on these disks to grip and scale almost any object, including trees, fences and walls. Its ultimate goal, of course, is light — and full sun at that.
Accommodating a plant's need for light creates challenges for a time-lapse crew filming in a studio environment. To simulate daytime conditions, Tim Shepherd, the time-lapse cameraman for the "
Plants" episode, installed a growing light as a stand-in for the sun and switched it off to imitate nighttime. In the final footage, however, you never see any nighttime shots.
"We took pictures throughout the night and day, but we used a flash with each exposure. In essence, every shot looked like a daytime shot," Shepherd said.
That introduced an interesting problem. During the day, with the growing light turned on, each photograph would get a double hit of light — one from the artificial light and one from the camera's flash. This would make the daytime images look different than the nighttime images, ruining the continuity of the final footage. Luckily, Shepherd had a solution.
"I mounted a system of blinds under each growing light," he said. "At the moment of each exposure, the blinds closed and shut out the light." After the picture was taken, the blinds reopened and allowed the growing light to shine once again on its target.
The Boston ivy didn't know it was being tricked. Neither did the audience. Shepherd had even more tricks up his sleeve when he set out to film the cat's claw creeper.
Continue: Blue-sky Thinking
