Even at only eight minutes long, Mike Olbinski’s film Monsoon IV is an intense reminder of the unstoppable forces of nature.
Mike Olbinski is a photographer and filmmaker with a passion for documenting the most powerful forces the planet is capable of creating in short artistic films. His films tend to remind viewers of how vulnerable they are to the destructive forces of storms.
For Monsoon IV, Olbinski says he shot over 110,000 frames of time lapsed storm footage, the finished result of which became the following video.
That beautiful soundtrack you hear was created by composer Peter Nanasi. Olbinski and Nanasi have worked together before on past projects, like Olbinski’s Pursuit, another short film of time lapsed clouds rolling across an intimidating sky filled with lighting. If I didn’t already love the music, I’d suggest listening to Pink Floyd while enjoying this video.
Creating videos such as this one can be exhausting. The editing process takes away so much of the accumulated footage that the finished product apparently only has about half of the 110,000 frames of footage that were shot for the film. Hours and hours of footage were sped up and packed into less than ten minutes. Like a true perfectionist, Olbinski had this to say about the project:
“The editing has taken me weeks and even right up until Monday evening I was still fixing and tweaking.”
To learn more about Olbinski’s work — including wedding and nature photography — check out his website, and to learn more about his storm chaser projects, like this one, read up on another one of Olbinski’s time lapsed storm films Pursuit. If you appreciated the music and imagery seen in Monsoon IV, then you should absolutely click on that link.
