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Entertainment

A Short Film Documents A 10-Hour Train Ride Through Four Seasons Simultaneously

Norway’s NRK adds to their repertoire of incredibly long travel documentaries.

NRK, the Norwegian equivalent to PBS, has made some pretty bold moves in the realm of documentary filmmaking. While many audiences might not have the patience for it, they’ve documented travels around Norway in films that account for every second of the journey, the lengthiest of which covered the full 134-hour boat trip from Bergen to Kirkenes. In this spirit, NRK sought to document train rides on the Nordland Railway, but managed to condense it into something more easily consumed.

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Recording the same 10-hour journey in each of the four seasons, NRK producers then synced them into a single 10-hour film in which the seasons change seamlessly. They describe the challenges of this process on their website:

Even though the Norwegian State Railway managed to keep the schedule on each of our recorded trips, the four journeys differed in position at any given time. The train will, for example, not enter a station at the exact same second in both June and March, and cannot keep the exact same speed at all times. In other words, we had to synchronize the video files in order to make the train appear to be at the same place at the same time in every video stream.

The television version of the film lasts 10 hours, not missing an inch of the 453 miles of track. However, if you don’t have ten hours to spare, the ultra-condensed, minute-long version above will give you a pretty good idea of riding the rails in Norway. They’ve also provided this video mixer that allows you to create your own version, switching between footage of each season as well as all four journeys simultaneously. See an example of that below.

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