London Timelapse Montage v1

-
https://twitter.com/Anatoleya
https://soundcloud.com/anatoleya

I usually make stopmotion videos, but thought I would take a break and make a one-off timelapse video. Here it is.

All the footage was taken over a three week period in November 2011, except for the first two daytime scenes at the beginning which were taken near the end of October 2011, and the rotation scene at Oxford Circus halfway through the video which was taken as part of another project earlier in the year for Minimood Records.

___________
EQUIPMENT: a Canon 5D Mark II with a Canon f/1.4 50mm and a f/1.4 24mm lens, and an Olympus EPL3 with a Panasonic Lumix 20mm f/1.7 pancake lens, and a basic tripod.


__________
SOFTWARE: I turned the image sequences into videos and applied the transitions in After Effects [details below].

_______
DETAILS:
I'm not normally a fan of timelapse videos, but there are a lot of scenes in London I wanted to include in a stopmotion video but couldn't find a way of connecting them together - the only way to do that was by a timelapse montage.

Initially I uploaded a simple version with all the clips joined together, but that seemed lazy and boring, so I redid it with transitions between most of the clips. I tried to zoom into areas in one clip that were similar to areas in another clip, so by zooming and panning in and then zooming out into another clip the transitions look more fluid. As the photos were taken at 4080x2720 on the 5D2 and 4032x2272 on the EPL3 this meant that for most scenes enough detail was there for me to zoom in a lot. Although in some scenes you'll see a bit of noise as I zoomed in over 2,000% some times. I didn't get the zoom/panning idea until after I had taken all the footage. If I had thought of it beforehand then I would've recorded it all at full 21MP [5616x3744 res] on the 5D2. Oh well. For other transitions I used the BCC [Boris Continuum Complete] swish transition and the BCC blur transition. Another method was by overlaying the ends of two clips and adjusting the opacity of each so they fade into each other.

I've uploaded the video at the original resolution, which is 4080x2720. So those with a good internet connection can view it in 4k quality.

N.B. The video has a 3:2 scale because the Canon 5D2 takes photos with a 3:2 scale and most of the footage was taken with a 5D2. I cropped the Olympus EPL3 footage to fit this.

All the daytime footage at the beginning and the Piccadilly Circus scene near the end was taken in diorama mode using the EPL3.

A lot of photos that made this video are in my Flickr Canon 5D2 album: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjwKsL21 and my Olympus EPL3 album: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjwokphK , though comparing the video with the flickr photos I see a bit of quality's been lost in the editing process.

______
MUSIC: I made several different piano pieces to go with the video. I ended up using this one. I know it's a bit strange, but I think it [roughly] goes with the video. I might upload another version of this video with a different piano piece I made later on.

• Category

  Film & Animation