Balloons over the plain at sunrise
Filmed from the ground, with a long lens, before the heat haze began.
At sunrise on the plain, a few hot-air balloons lift off and drift slowly over the grass, while animals graze below as if nothing unusual is happening. Jonah filmed sixteen seconds from the ground.
Chapters
- 0:00 Two balloons
- 0:06 Drifting closer
- 0:11 The herd below
From the ground, not the air
We could have filmed from a balloon basket. Most people do. From the air, you see the plain. From the ground, you see the balloons, and the strange, quiet beauty of them floating above animals that do not look up. We chose the ground.
The timing
Balloons fly at dawn, because the air is calm and cool. As the sun warms the ground, the air starts to rise and move, and flying becomes difficult. That gave us about forty minutes of good light and calm balloons. We set up in the dark and waited.
A long lens
The balloons were more than a kilometre away. Jonah used a long lens, which makes distant things look closer together. That is why the balloons and the animals seem to share the same space, even though they were hundreds of metres apart.
A long lens is a way of telling the truth about how a place feels, not where things are.
Jonah Mills
The heat haze
Long lenses have one problem on warm mornings: heat haze. As the ground warms, the air above it shimmers and softens distant objects. We filmed in the first fifteen minutes after sunrise, before the haze began, and the picture stayed sharp.
Colour
The warm colour is the sunrise itself. We did very little in the edit, only a slight lift in the shadows so the animals were visible against the dark grass.
Ballooning in brief
A hot-air balloon has no steering. The pilot can only go up or down, by heating the air with the burner or letting it cool. To change direction, the pilot looks for winds blowing in different directions at different heights. That is why balloon flights need calm mornings and very experienced pilots. The balloons in our film were flying low and slowly, which made them easy to follow with the camera, and kept the burner quiet for most of the shot.
Being a guest
We filmed from a viewing area chosen by the park rangers, who keep visitors away from the animals and away from the balloons' landing area. The animals were there long before we arrived and would be there long after.