Timelapse

15 Feb Timelapse

I’m a big, big fan of timelapse footage in TV, film and beyond.

In 2014 I started my attempt to recreate Netflix “House of Cards” title sequence, shot for shot, using my iPhone 4 and iPad mini. It took a year to find the time to get the right conditions and opportunities to capture the dawn til dusk sequence of a city coming to life and settling for the night.

Watch here:

Before that I’d done DSLR timelapse but it was timelapse on my iPad and phone which really captured my imagination because technically it was practically effortless. Timelapse continues to be a great storytelling device – besides the House of Cards title sequence, Breaking Bad in particular used timelapse as a storytelling device; to show the passing of time, to capture a process, to emphasise isolation or simply as a transition from one scene to another. Take a look…

I made my own example of using timelapse to show isolation – this was shot using an iPhone XR:

So while timelapse is typically about landscapes and accelerated cloud movements the LEGO timelapse below is about process and using a couple of different angles to show that. What LumaFusion (editing software) is great at is enabling split screens to show those two camera angles at once if needed. This was shot using an iPhone XR (left hand perspective) and an iPhone 12 Pro Max (right hand).

The thing to one aware of is setting the correct interval between frames. A busy street scene probably shouldn’t be more than a second apart. If there’s time for people to exit the frame between frames being captured then instead of creating a sense of accelerated movement people will appear to teleport in and out of shot which feels chaotic rather than busy. The same applies to every variation of timelapse shot – experimenting with time intervals and exposures to get the effect you’re after. Want to learn more about #MadeOnAMobile? Visit my website: PlayfulCommunications.co.uk (the happy home of #MadeOnAMobile)