Louie Schwartzberg
Louie Schwartzberg
Louie Schwartzberg, also known as Louis Schwartzberg, is an American director, producer, and cinematographer. Schwartzberg is recognized as a pioneer in high-end time-lapse cinematography. Schwartzberg is the only cinematographer in the world who has been shooting time-lapse film 24 hours a day, 7 days a week continuously for over three decades. Schwartzberg is a visual artist who focuses on connections between humans and the subtleties of nature and environment...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCinematographer
Date of Birth21 February 1950
CountryUnited States of America
With high-speed cameras, we can do the opposite of time lapse. We can shoot images that are thousands of times faster than our vision. And we can see how nature's ingenious devices work, and perhaps we can even imitate them.
I want viewers to see that everything is connected, even the little guys like pollinators and flowers.
I like to do films that celebrate life.
A third of our food comes from pollinating plants.
Basically, the intersection between the animal world and the plant world is where life regenerates itself over and over, billions of times each day. It's the foundation of life on our planet.
The sound of a million butterflies flapping their wings is indescribable. It's very heavenly.
I grew up in Brooklyn, and my parents were Holocaust survivors, so they never taught me anything about nature, but they taught me a lot about gratitude.
I love all of the ecosystems - mountains, deserts, rainforests. They're beautiful, and nature has so many different flavors to it.
When I heard that the bees were in trouble, the fact that they're disappearing and not coming back to the hive, which is a big issue, since a third of the food we eat comes from plants, I figured you couldn't tell the story of the bees without the story of the flowers and how they basically have evolved together for over 150 years.
Metamorphosis has always been the greatest symbol of change for poets and artists. Imagine that you could be a caterpillar one moment and a butterfly the next.
Beauty and seduction, I believe, is nature's tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with.
When a dragonfly flutters by, you may not realize, but it's the greatest flier in nature. It can hover, fly backwards, even upside down.
I think we need to do some deep soul searching about what's important in our lives and renew our spirit and our spiritual thinking, whether it's through faith-based religion or just through loving nature or helping your fellow man.
I became passionate about nature filmmaking when I graduated from UCLA, and one of the things I always wanted to do was shoot really high quality film, so I got into time-lapse photography - so that means when you shoot a flower, you're shooting, like, one frame every twenty minutes, so that's basically two seconds of a film per day.