Night Train

The sound of lights passing through a dark landscape seen from a moving train. Night Train is a time-lapse film that reduces the journey between Birmingham and London to two minutes. It uses a similar technique to Soundtrack for converting the lights into sounds. Night Train may be seen as continuing the Vertovian tradition of employing film to reveal phenomena not normally visible to the naked eye. It was shot from a moving train at night, using time exposures of half a second per frame. The camera records passing lights as traces, so the nearer the objects to the train, the longer the trace. This results in the familiar travel experience, whereby we appear to pass nearer objects faster than distant ones. Here, this translates into a black screen with abstract horizontal white lines, distant light sources making short feint lines, nearer ones long and bright lines.' (Nicky Hamlyn)