Filmmaker Ben Carver has long wanted to film inside Metro to capture the “many moments of poetic beauty while traveling,” but it took a job with the Department of Homeland Security to be able to cross it off his bucket list.

“You could really magnify the magic of being in these spaces and combat some of the negativity that people express about Metro,” says Carver, whose background is in theater and dance. “I never would have predicted I’d get to do this through Homeland Security, of all places.”

WMATA doesn’t often permit film shootings, but made an exception for DHS’s film about how to keep railways and other forms of surface transportation safe, after Al Qaeda’s magazine named U.S. train stations as the terrorist organization’s number one target.

The 12-minute “Securing Surface Transportation,” which Carver wrote, produced, and edited, features a ton of timelapse shots of the Woodley Park and Chinatown stations, all filmed in the course of one day: Woodley after the morning rush and Chinatown in the afternoon.

The shoot was a two-person job, he says, with one person filming and the other making sure that travelers steer clear of the set-up, which included a 3-foot motorized track. “In the age of the cellphone, people will literally run right into your camera,” says Carver.

The camera was often set up right behind a backpack, which riders did not notice (“If you see something, say something” announcements be damned).

He says the “number one priority has to be setting up outside of the foot traffic … it would be way too easy to knock the camera over, and we don’t want to create a safety hazard for travelers, Metro operators, or the space itself.”

Carver would love to return to film more inside Metro stations, which he thinks could be an effective way for the transit agency to win back riders and public support. “It bothers me that people are so negative about Metro when really, it’s such an incredible space,” he says. “There’s so much beauty in it that we don’t recognize.”