Fill Me In
Find a dark room, turn the volume all the way up, and start the visual masterpiece of Singapore’s growth over the past eight years, condensed into just five minutes.
Better than before
Lion City Rising is the third chapter to The Lion City Project, a time-lapse series that reveals changes in Singapore that are invisible in our daily travels. It has been more than four years since director Keith Loutit released his last film, the Lion City II – Majulah. The films show Singapore’s landscape transform, as old buildings are methodically torn down while new developments like the South Beach building, Kampung Admiralty, and Eden Apartments unveil themselves.
“With the story I want to tell with Singapore growing, the idea I had was to speed up time so much that it really felt like you were experiencing life in a different way,” said Loutit in an interview with Coconuts Singapore.
How did he do it?
Piecing together this Blade Runner-esque video took phenomenal effort. Imagine spending close to a thousand days on shoots, editing over a million photographs, and assembling more than 3,000 time-lapse sequences. He even had to wait for clear skies and calculate the sun’s path to snap the photos at the right time for consistency.
Fun fact: Loutit had to climb around 1,385 flights of stairs to capture these stunning views. That’s like climbing the Burj Khalifa (the tallest building in the world) eight times!
He did not just document the construction of these structures but also the growth of life within our garden city. Watch as plants and vines grow aplenty and creep along the façade of buildings like the Oasia Hotel, traffic flows smoothly through the vein like roads, and ships and cargo zoom through the restless port of Singapore.
Please don’t stop the music
While you are focused on the mesmerising visuals, the industrial trance-like music pulls you into another narrative of unstoppable progress. Composed by Michael Adler Miltersen from Sepia Productions, the rhythmic music will make your heart beat along to the pulse of the city as you move from scene to scene.
Iconic structures like the Pearl Bank Apartments are demolished in seconds. In the same breath, new buildings claw their way up in the background. It drives in the anxiety of becoming obsolete and being replaced by something more new and shiny. But it is also a testament to Singapore’s industriousness –our ability to adapt to changes and reluctance to remain stagnant.
“Architecture in Singapore has something for everyone, but my main interest is in Singapore’s constant renewal and reinvention,” commented Loutit.
