Shooting extended timelapse...

[Damon Hoydysh]

I would like to shoot a timelapse of a building going up in Manhattan, and I'm looking for some technical consultation. Does anyone have any experience shooting a timelapse that takes place over a 6month period. I'm thinking that I would use a still camera - with a timelpase function. How many frames per day would be adequate? Construction goes from about 7am until 4pm everyday so I would need the shots during this time period, daily, for 6months.

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Damon Hoydysh

http://www.highlinestudios.com

[Joshua Turner]

I would like to shoot a timelapse of a building going up in Manhattan, and I'm looking for some technical consultation. Does anyone have any experience shooting a timelapse that takes place over a 6month period. I'm thinking that I would use a still camera - with a timelpase function. How many frames per day would be adequate? Construction goes from about 7am until 4pm everyday so I would need the shots during this time period, daily, for 6months.

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Damon Hoydysh

http://www.highlinestudios.com

 

First off, you need to make sure you have a set place to take your photos. Obviously this must remain constant, and the precise angle of your pan and tilt, as well as your height must remain the same as well. One thing you might do if you have no reserves on spray painting the bottom of your tripod (and a sidewalk), is to place the legs of the tripod on the ground and spray the legs (somewhere the paint will be permanent for a while.) This should give you a nice permanent mark (if this is even possible in your location... remember this could also be an issue with the city if you're vandalizing a sidewalk.) You might also find a defining feature such as a distinct crack in the sidewalk if you can't spray paint it. Also, make marks on your tripod of the angles and heights of each leg and the positions of the head. Make sure to take care when handling your tripod so you don't erase them by accident or smudge them off.

As for how many photos, I guess it really depends on the length of your time lapse for how many frames you shoot a day. Figure if you're film is 24 frames a second and you're covering a 6 month period, you need to count the number of days and divide that by your days, then divide that by your frame rate to find your length. I.e = 180 days / 1 shot a day = 180 frames / 24 fps = 7.5 seconds.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Peace,

Josh

[John Dayluke]

I suppose it’s too late, because you’re already shooting your movie as construction is going on (almost three months has passed). And it would be interesting to know how could manage that thing with proper mounting of your camera and maintaining it constant.

 

I’ve been shooting kind of similar movie and had to create special mounting because of need to use my single camera on my other projects. So this mounting has two parts, one of it was placed constant and fastened on the ground (location allowed it), wile the second part could be attached to the camera (and it was made the special way, so it could suite the camera similar way every time I attached it). And the main thing is that these two parts have proper fastenings and whenever whey was joined together it preserve the same position of the camera. So, I hope this could be useful information for someone to start thinking his own ideas from that.