Over 6 hours of continuous footage of a train ride from Dewanganj, on the banks of the Jumuna River, to Dhaka, Bangladesh’s bustling mega-city.

This 6 hour slow-tv feature is shot in stunning 4K resolution and  presented without a single dropped frame or interruption to either image or sound. The journey begins in the quiet rural North of Bangladesh with the sunrise streaming through vegetation and reflecting off paddy fields. After 5 hours the landscape begins to close in on the trackside revealing many of the development issues that face this rapidly growing and urbanising country.

Credits:

Directed, filmed, edited and graded by  Toby Smith

Visual effects by Compost Creative

Technical Information

Recorded on a travel day after completing an editorial assignment for Friendship Bangladesh, SES and Getty Images Reportage. The original footage is recorded at 3804 x 2160 pixels and was captured in Pro-Res 422 giving a total capture of 1.65 TB which represented 558,000 uninterrupted frames. The graded, edited version was quality controlled and compressed down with Adobe Premiere CC to an MP4 file. This 126GB MP4 took  72 hours to process and was deliberately within 1GB of YouTube’s technical limit.  The file took 5 hours to upload on Getty Images’ enterprise ISDN connection and YouTube’s servers spent 4 days processing the file quality from 320p upto the full 2160p.  Each of the above stages was eventually completed after 2-3 months of trial and error.