Still Water

Every shoreline has half an hour in which the water does nothing at all. No wind, no boats, no ducks — just a surface showing the opposite slope a second time, reversed and a shade darker. We like to film that half hour in one piece, without cuts, because it cannot be summarised.

Autumn is the most reliable season for it. The air cools faster than the water, the haze hangs low, and for a short while the reflection is almost as sharp as the original. If you start recording then, the main thing is to leave the camera alone.

A few weeks later the same place is hard to recognise. Snow visually pushes the shoreline forward, the trees lose their volume, and the water reads as black simply because nothing around it has any colour left to give. Sound carries further in winter. You hear your own tripod before you hear the lake.

For the recording that is a relief: there is less to keep an eye on. No leaves sailing through the frame, no insects in front of the lens, no walkers changing direction in the background. Just a bank, a slope, and an edge between them that sits dead straight in the viewfinder.

Stillness is never entirely still. Even on the smoothest lake there are flat waves you only notice once a leaf is lying on one and travelling with it. That is what this channel is about: not the events on the water, but the long stretches in between, where watching slows you down. That is also why we barely cut this material. Passing by, you take it for a freeze frame — and only after a while do you notice that the whole picture is drifting, very slowly.