Art Class TimeLapses

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While Sadie and I were in Seattle for her art workshop last week, I decided one of the days that it would be fun to set up the camera on a tripod in the corner of the room, out of everyone's way, and shoot a timelapse of the entire day's work. Timelapse sequences are nearly ubiquitous these days, found in documentaries and feature films alike. I am a big fan of time-distortions in film, but hadn't previously attempted any long-term sessions of my own.

For those of you who need an explanation of timelapse photography, it basically means recording an event using single frame exposures at regular intervals to produce an effect of moving quickly through time. In this case I used my camera, the Panasonic HVX200, in it's own "interval recording" mode. The HVX is a solid state memory camcorder, meaning that it records onto memory cards rather than digital tape. While limiting the space to the number of high definition images fitting on two 8gb cartridges, it's not as flexible as tape, which can just roll for an hour straight or more. The benefit lies in the transfer between the camera and the computer, bringing it into editing stage just that much sooner. Also, the HVX only shoots the frames it needs, so it's more conservative than tape would be performing the same operation. For this type of job, shooting in this format, the HVX acts much more like a digital still camera than a video camera.

For timelapses, depending on the type of effect you are going for, you can record with very short intervals (a few seconds) to very long intervals (a few minutes/hours/etc.) In this case, in order to keep the durations of the final pieces relatively short, I decided I would expose 1 frame every 30 seconds. After the first day I realized my math was a little off (not uncommon in my life) so the final film, with 7 hours worth of images, was only 30 seconds of playback- a little shorter than I was going for.

I decided it would be worth it to record the class for a second day at 1 frame for every 10 seconds. The result was a bit more fluid and interesting than day one, but watching it straight can be kind of tedious. I browsed through my iTunes and picked out a track from Amon Tobin, a song called "Bridge" from one of his earlier albums "Permutation" an era when much of his music still had a heavy jazz influence. It seemed to fit the mood perfectly.

So this is my first attempt at some real-deal timelapse. I hope you enjoy it. Maybe next time I can hook up some kind of motion control rig and add some motion while the camera is exposing. There's a motion control timelapse shot in Oliver Stone's U-Turn that blew me away back in my film school days, shot out in the desert in Arizona. Just one of many extremely cool shots in that film.

Stay tuned for more films shot during our Seattle trip- I shot a slew of footage inside the new Seattle Public Library, which, while it sounds like it could be mind-numbingly boring, is actually one of the most engrossing feats of architecture I have ever seen- well, for a library at least.