By James MillerThe Marion Star

LaRue- "Are you coming to the barn raising?"

The question from a neighbor sparked the idea of a time-lapse video for Pleasant Elementary School sixth-grade math teacher Scott Miller, who had cultivated a friendship with an Amish man and his wife just east of the village of LaRue.

Miller's barn raising video has almost 2 million visits on YouTube, and has been viewed around the world.

"I enjoy being around construction, and I've got a pickup truck, so I wasn't surprised that (he) invited me," said Miller, who out of respect for his neighbor's privacy, doesn't want to share his friend's name.

Over 100 Amish men showed up on a sunny day last May to erect a 5,000-square-foot barn, which includes a horse-riding arena, stalls and a 3,000-square-foot second-story hay loft.

"When you get a crew like that together, you don't want anything to slow you down," he said. "So if you run out of something, they need someone who could drive off and get it."

Miller worked construction and studied communications at Cedarville University before completing his education degree at The Ohio State University.

"I really like time-lapse photography, so I asked him if I could take pictures of the construction," he said. "He agreed, but I had shoot from a distance and couldn't show any faces."

Many old-order Amish communities view photography as a form of graven images, which their interpretation of Christian Scriptures forbids. Miller said his respect for his neighbors' culture required some compromises in order to win their approval of his video project.

"I just set my tripod on the other side of the road in the morning, turned my camera on, and went over to help. I mostly just carried lumber and tried to stay out of the way," he said of his contribution to the actual construction.

Miller's gear is surprisingly simple: a Canon 60D camera, an 18-135 f3.5-5.6 zoom lens, a tripod and a Pixel TW282TX wireless timer, Miller said he paid about $70 for the project. A $30 software program called Sequence allows him "play" the images as movie.

Miller leaned on his math skills to calculate some of the variables to make the video.

"I had to figure out how long my batteries would last and how much memory I would need for about 12 hours of work," he said. "I figured that one image every 20 seconds would be enough."

The barn went up in just under 8 hours, which resulted in 1,600 images that make up Miller's 3 1/2 minutes of video. The exposures were captured automatically by the camera and timer set-up as Miller worked across the road, but the shoot wasn't without some glitches.

"I kept worrying that I didn't have the barn framed correctly, and at one point I turned around and saw a car had parked right in front of my camera," he said.

The frames of the parked car had to be edited out, as well as some images of a passing buggy that clearly showed some Amish faces.

"When I first ran the video, I was kind of hypnotized by it," he said. "When I finished editing, I was pretty happy with it. I loaded on an iPad and took it over to show (his neighbor). Some of his family members who couldn't be at the barn-raising happened to be there, and they really enjoyed how fast everything happens in the video."

"One of them asked me if I could run it backwards," he said.

Miller posted the video on YouTube so his sixth-grade students could see it. By the end of August, the video had generated about 600 visits. A month later, the views jumped to 30,000 after a link of the video appeared on an online aggregator's website.

"It's fun to check the counter and watch the numbers. But when it hit 30,000, I thought 'something must be wrong with the computer.'"

By that time, Web-based companies that track who's viewing what online had contacted Miller, asking to represent his video for a cut of the advertising revenue. Miller and his brother in-law, who is an attorney, researched six different companies before settling on Storyful, a Web-based content aggregator that verifies authenticity and buys rights to images and videos for newsrooms and advertisers, based on topics.

Miller said the popularity of his video surprised him, and he hasn't seen any revenue yet, but has been promised a 60 percent split of ad revenue from Storyful. The current ad on the video is from a conceal-carry firearm instruction outfit out of Michigan.

"I produced this just for the enjoyment, never thought it would generate this kind of interest," said Miller, who would like to use any money he receives to replace his old camcorder to document the daily lives of his two children while they are still young.

"But my wife wants a concrete driveway."

About 2,300 comments have been posted about the video online. Most of them have been positive, said Miller, but some ugly stereotypes were posted, taking the Amish to task for puppy mills or questioning their building practices. His wife Penny edits the comments so the site remains suitable for sixth-graders.

"I think what people like most about the video is the teamwork," she wrote in response to a recent post.

"It's also impressive to everyone because (the work) contrasts so much with the lives of us who push buttons all day in front of screens," she said.

"They are hard-working people," Miller said of his Amish friends. "The barn-raising makes me think about what we all could do if we lived a little differently."

View Scott Miller's video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsTB0HnM6WM .

jsmiller@gannett.com

twitter: @motionblur56