Timelapse Filming

27th October
The boys are finishing the autumnal establishing shots. A technique we like a lot is timelapse photography - ideal for recording events that take place over a long period like flowers blooming and dying, insects making cocoons or spiders spinning their webs. One simply pops a stills camera on a tripod in front of the subject, set the timer to take a snap every few seconds or minutes. Then, when it's done, run the frames at 25 frames per second and Hey Presto! you see the process fast forwarded. Here’s an example and I really like this one

Timelapse is a good way to show time transitions i.e day to night, sunrises, sunny day turning to bad weather, and so on. In this case it gets a lot more complicated partly because the light changes more, which will have implications on shutter speed and aperture settings. The other complicating factor is that The Director and the Camera Boys have been experimenting with mechanisms that move the camera during the period of the timelapse so that the camera can follow the arc of the moon rising, or sweep the horizon as rain clouds gather. To make these mechanisms one needs a lot of big Meccano-type bits and some clockworky stuff, then you set up your moving tripod and hope the weather does what you’ve predicted. It’s all trial and error but somehow very beautiful and satisfying when it works.

I've just been searching Youtube for a good example of a tracking timelapse - and failed which might make us world pioneers or it might just mean that I'm a bad researcher