And then there are some places which have been on my personal bucket list for a long time and when I finally go there I do also shoot an episode there. and shot most of the North America episodes in that time. La Rioja and Aragón in Spain are one of those.Īnd when my girlfriend was working in Boston for three years, I spent a lot of time in the U.S. Sometimes I am also asked by tourist councils to produce an episode of their destination for the series. This is for instance how most of the episodes in China have happened. When I am in a certain city or country for a corporate project that I am realizing with my production company spoonfilm, I usually try to stay a little longer to get some shots for a Little Big World episode. Also the first 50 films were all produced in HD, while the last 20 episodes were produced in 4K, which makes the post production much slower.Ĭurbed: Browsing your video collection, there seems to be a good mix of major cities like Chicago and Guangzhou, and lesser known places like the Ardennes in Belgium and Aragón in Spain. On my shooting trips now, I carry along two DSLRs with tripods, a small motion control device, and a drone. The first 20 episodes I basically only shot with a DSLR camera and a Gorillapod. I try not to use too much aerial footage as I prefer to focus on small human actions of daily life, which is difficult to achieve with a drone. However, still most of the footage from the newer episodes comes from a regular camera.
About two years ago, I started to use some drone shots to add another dimension to the films.
JD: Most of the shots are done with a DSLR camera and I spend a lot of time on vantage points to collect my footage. There is also quite some time involved in research and post production, which can also take up to two weeks.Ĭurbed: And how do you actually take the footage? Is it drones? Has the technology changed in the years since you first started? Shooting time is really different for each project and can range from two days to two weeks. JD: This is still pretty much my own project and I do pretty much everything by myself. It basically just happened along the way.Ĭurbed: Can you tell us what goes into making each video-how much time, travel, and resources? Are you the only person who works on them? As you can see, I never really planned this as a long-running series.
As one result, I received the first licensing requests from TV channels.
When I submitted the series a half year later with some more episodes for the Vimeo Awards, it ended up there as a Finalist. When this one was also staff picked by Vimeo I think I thought about turning this fun project into a series for the first time. This first film ended up in the Vimeo Staff Picks and all the positive comments encouraged me to do another one half a year later when I went to trip to Crete.
So I took my camera gear along to a trip to Thailand to get some shots and see how it would work out. Joerg Daiber: Back in 2011, I saw some tilt-shift stuff for the first time and was intrigued by the technique and wanted to experiment with it myself. That’s a long time! How did you get the idea to start doing these tilt-shift videos? And how did you pick Thailand to start? Curbed: The first Little Big World video was posted in 2011.