This is a film about a little pond close to my house, which comes along my way almost everyday when I am taking an afternoon hike with my family. It were actually my kids who got me to have a closer look, as they always want to stop by the pond and watch the many things going on in and around it.

I was amazed by what I saw. Hence, I started to take the camera with me and took some footage. It turned into sort of an obsession over 4 years, and I had to overcome many obstacles on the way.

Apart from technical challenges which are described further down below, I was struggling a lot at the end with the storyline, which became part of the reason why it took 4 years eventually to finish this off. Year after year I did not see the ends coming together – but finally I was able to record the missing pieces to formulate a story.

This is sort of a film for children (some of them grown up like me ;-)) - I hope you like it and your children too!

Filmmaking is always a collaborative effort, so I was very happy when my brother Stefan Machu (stefan.machu@chello.at, a studied audio engineer) offered to do the sound design. It is a mix of natural sounds recorded at the pond (Zoom H2 and Sennheiser MKE 400) and foley, and I was amazed to see how he produced all of the foley sounds on his own (using a Rode NTG3 and a ZOOM H6 recorder).

Around the same time Krystian Shek (info@utcwired.net) got in contact with me, and he offered to do the original score for the film – we had collaborated earlier already (see e.g. Stopover Bangkok or The travel diaries II here on vimeo) – and I am very happy with the way it finally came out. I strongly recommend to have a look at his music on itunes or utcmusic.de

Finally, I have to mention Peter Baker as well who did the voiceover (mail@peterbakervoiceover.com, peterbakervoiceover.com) for this film. Also with him I already have a long standing collaboration (see e.g. Oh Angkor or The Bali Experience here on vimeo), and he is a professional in every way.

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Now, to some of the technical details: a major challenge for example was to get as close as possible to the little heroes of this film, which were retracting to the middle of the pond obviously whenever I tried to get up close. Hence, I used the telezoom mode of the Lumix GH2 a lot which uses a centercrop of the sensor to give an effective 5.2 crop factor. Coupled with a Tokina 60-300mm Zoom lens and a 2x teleconverter I got an effective (5.2x300x2 = ) 3120mm focal lenght which got me close enough. But have you tried once to frame your target with such a focal length, not to mention that the slightest camera shake would turn footage unusable quickly? Therefore in addition I built a custom 5m crane which allowed me to put a GoPro in the middle of the action. The telezoom crop also came in handy when using a 50mm Canon FD macro lens, turning it into a 260mm macro effectively. By using 25mm extender rings I was able to put objects right in front of the lens for amazing close ups.

Let me know if you like it!