You may have heard the classic Crowded House song ‘Four Seasons In One Day.’ Now, there is a video that displays the changing of all four seasons through a brilliant series of transitions. Using a Mavic 2 Pro and third-party app Litchi, Arvids Baranovs chose about 30 distinctive locations in Latvia—from winding rivers to National Parks—and put his aerial hyperlapse skills to use so he could illustrate the changing of seasons.
‘The change of seasons is such a self-evident phenomenon that we take it for granted yet we struggle to catch it in the act. Look outside: nature seems so static compared to the hectic lives we must live. At best, we might notice a sudden heatwave or an unexpected freeze, a violent storm or a particularly vibrant sunset. But in fact nature is everything but still – it’s in constant motion changing and morphing, we just function on different timescales,’ Baranovs describes in his article for PetaPixel.
He also muses that the gradual changing of seasons over time is why most humans are unable to recognize substantial threats to our planet such as climate change. Baranovs drove thousands of miles, returning to the same locations throughout the year time and again so he could capture footage to illustrate his vision. He recorded the exact GPS of his launch spot and the height. Litchi is useful for saving mission data. This enabled Baranovs to blend the same shots taken at different times of the year.
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Instead of including a narrative in the video, he let the footage itself convey his message – there is no clear beginning or end to nature, itself. Running just a bit over seven-and-a-half minutes the viewer is taken through a variety of locations that change from Summer to Fall, followed by snow, and finally the rebirth of foliage that signals Spring has arrived.
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Baranovs also credits the words of French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) as inspiration for the video, specifically ‘The Perception of Change’ (‘La perception du changement’).
‘Change is absolute and radical: it has no support. We are misled by sight, which is only the avant-garde for touch: it prepares us for action. But if we switch to hearing a melody, we have a better sense of indivisible change, although we still do have a tendency to hear a series of notes. This is due either to our thinking of the discontinuous series of efforts needed to sing the melody, or because we see the notes on the conductor’s script. But if we come back to sight and think about what science teaches us, we see how matter is dissolved into action, how there are no things that move, but only changes in the rhythms of motion. Nowhere do we see this “substantiality of change” better than in our inner life. We are misled by thinking of a series of invariable states with an unchanging ego for support, like actors passing over a stage. But there is no underlying thing-ego that changes. All we are is a melody; this is our duration (interfused heterogeneous continuous change), although we are led by practical interest to spatialize this time.’
More details explaining how Baranovs executed this project can be found on his blog.