Tristan Greszko was logging another Saturday night in the Factory Studios when, just after midnight, he put the finishing touches on the tilt-shift short film he had spent all winter making. He posted “A Tiny Day in the Jackson Hole Backcountry” on his Facebook page and his blog, texted a few people “who had tolerated my absence all winter” and then went to bed.
That first day — closing day at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort — drew 3,037 plays, a seemingly sizeable amount. Then, April 4 dawned and April 5, each with more than 20,000 plays. All told, he e-mailed only one person about the film.
As of Monday afternoon, “A Tiny Day” has been played more than 220,000 times. Last week, Wired magazine posted “A Tiny Day” on its home page. If forced to classify himself, Greszko would wear the label of landscape/action photographer, but he finds landscapes boring by themselves. For context, he always includes tiny people in sweeping scapes. “A Tiny Day” channels this aesthetic.
Greszko shrugs off any suggestion of singularity. “Originality is one of those weird concepts,” he said. “People like to flaunt it, but in the history of art, there isn’t a lot of it.”Tilt-shift photography has been around for years, he said, but 2008 was a standout, both for the genre and his awareness of it. While paragliding above Teton Village, he took a tilt-shift shot of the Aerial Tram under construction. On Sept. 22, 2008, he posted the picture as the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s Photo of the Day. He started thinking about doing a funny miniature project.
Last summer, he worked for a Canon program and shot tilt-shift pictures with a view camera in the Grand Canyon. In January, a miniature film of Whistler, British Columbia, strengthened his resolve to make his own ski-rich movie. Having lived in San Francisco for a while, he returned to Jackson with a movie mission.
He began shooting balcony stills of downtown, and started working the backcountry on Feb. 2. Originally, he planned to shoot for two or three days. Eschewing a storyboard, he knew he wanted an ascending tram scene, the bulk of the shots in the backcountry, and then an apres-ski end. He had an abstract idea of his goals. Ultimately, he spent 15 days photographing his friends.
The Jackson Hole obsession with skiing drags on Greszko: Immersed in the culture, he gets tired of the hubris involved. But none of that matters in his movie. The people are too tiny to recognize. In miniature, deep powder dissolves into a white blanket blur, and lines look less burly, more fun.
“It removes that sense of, ‘I went and did this,’” he said. “Skiing is strange to the rest of the world. To us, it’s life, it’s what we love. “A Tiny Day” channels the glee of leading a snowbound life. Miniature breaks through the inaccessibility of big mountain skiing, he said. It removes the extremeness, the mystique.
People ask if he used a helicopter. No, only his knowledge of the mountain and generally a longer lens. Back at the Factory, he used Photoshop to create the miniature effect on each frame, then combined the frames into an animation in QuickTime, and stabilized each sequence in After Effects.
He made the film from thousands of still photographs. With 30 frames per second, the 7-minute- long film links about 12,600 still shots. Thousands more enveloped the frames he chose to include. He estimates he spent a large 200 to 400 hours on the tiny production. He liked being immersed in it, being in control of all elements.
“A Tiny Day” fulfilled his mission. He may submit “A Tiny Day” to short-film contests, but he won’t do another tilt-shift movie. “I shot most of the big lines I wanted to,” he said. “I shot my friends. It was done right. It fulfilled all of my dreams for the project.”