Downtown Springfield: A Time Lapse

I previewed a process a few weeks back that I call Panoramic Narrative. With it, I'm exploring the telling of narrative through the use of multiple frames, a step past single shot photography. Stop motion and time lapse videos a step beyond even multiple frame narratives and marks my transition from photo to video.

I began making these videos out of necessity—my team was assigned the task to shoot an accompanying video for an audio project in our production class. It was during this time that I began to strongly desire to shoot video, but had no capacity to do so. I had become interested in stop motion, a process I could do with the equipment I had available. Having no other options for class, we decided to shoot stop motion, one of my very first attempts.

The time lapses I'm showcasing today and tomorrow represent the most serious and best produced of the time lapses that I've made.

Here's the process for today's time lapse: I mounted my camera on a tripod and set it in the front passenger seat. With the help of some colleagues and a remote shutter release, I was able to capture the short ride around downtown Springfield, MO in several hundred photos.

I used iMovie to render the video. First, I had to import the photos into iPhoto, there's no other way to get them into iMovie. Before importing them into iMovie, I had to adjust the Initial Photo Placement. Had I skipped this step, I would have had to manually change the placement for each frame, adding hours of unnecessary work.

How to get there: File—Project Properties—Timing. Change Initial Photo Placement to either crop of fit to screen.

Now I could drag my photos into the project (click the camera icon half way up the page and on the right). Once they were in, I selected them all and right clicked to change the duration of each still. In iMovie, the shortest duration is .1 second or 10 frames per second. For whatever reason, iMovie doesn't actually play the still back at that rate. It's closer to 7 or 8 frames per second.

I slapped on some text, transitions, and audio and called it a wrap.