A Year-Long Walk in the Woods.

This is a time-lapse film of a walk through my local woods shot over a calendar year.
Chaddesden Wood Nature Reserve in Derby, UK, is an area of ancient woodland, mainly oak, but also other traditional British species, both deciduous and evergreen.

I set out to show the wood as it changes through the seasons, but then started thinking about different times of day, different weather, subjects of interest, and how to negotiate tights corners, and also to work out how the dogs could put in a cameo appearance!

The path through the woods is about 1km long, and I'd decided to do the filming in terms of one 20 metre section per week, returning the following week to where I'd left off the previous week, not always completely accurately, nor necessarily with the same weather conditions (eg sudden snow!).
The filming itself was done as a series of still frames, moving about 10cm distance from one frame to the next (rather than moving in terms of a fixed time from one frame to the next). In total, the film is made up of over 9000 individual frames.

To try to get the movement as fluid as possible, I built a wooden dolly on which to stand a tripod, and then built some wooden rails along which to move the dolly. Of course, I couldn't run rails around the entire 1km length, and certainly not leave them there for a year, so I had 2 lengths of rail, which I connected together, and when the dolly move off one rail onto the next, I could then move the back length of rail to the front.
This wasn't an exact science (to say the least!), and that, combined with the rough ground of the paths surface, resulted in the film not being as smooth as I had hoped it would be, so I apologise for that. I did think though that my filming technique gets smoother as the year went on?
I'm hoping that the inevitable jerkiness in some way is seen as part and parcel of a moving time-lapse film.....

The frames were assembled into a movie using Final Cut Express on a Mac, and the soundtrack was something I put together using Garageband on a Mac.

I hope the film shows this particular piece of woodland in a new light to those who already know it, and why it's a resource we should take care to protect and preserve. I for one feel privileged to have it on my doorstep.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• chaddesden
• wood
• nature
• reserve
• oakwood
• deby
• timelapse
• time-lapse
• woods
• year
• walk
• moushu
• zita
• ditto

[canigetanoorah]

Does anyone remember when Chaddesden Wood used to be called Bluebell Wood?

[marloncole]

@canigetanoorah It still is ;) It became officially known as "Chaddesden Wood Nature Reserve" in 1991 - the year before I moved here, so I've never known it as Bluebell Wood as such.

My daughter tells me that everyone in Chad call it "Bluebell Wood", although in Oakwood, people seem to just call it "The Woods".

[thepatrickweir]

how does this only have 780 views! there should be atleast one for every frame haha

[marloncole]

@thepatrickweir I'm in no doubt whatsoever that YouTube doesn't count views accurately.

PS. I don't have After Effects, or any Adobe products for that matter :(

[KYUSS123456]

That's great, but how was it done?

[marloncole]

@KYUSS123456 Please read the video description, where I've included some detail of how it was done - let me know if you have specific questions about any of it :)

[thepatrickweir]

Hold on to that raw footage!!! If assembled in after effects you could run the warp stabilizer on it and it would get rid of any and all bumps and it would take about 2 hours to render out a perfectly smooth version... pm me for more info if you need it.

[KYUSS123456]

@marloncole I tried that but for some reason that box is blank for me.

[marloncole]

I've created another film, a "real" film this time, of the woods in their Autumn finery - it's added as a video response to this film - hope you enjoy that too! ;)

[DeputyDarwg]

Nice..enjoyed that, love the 3 dogs jumping onto the bench!!