The Hyperlapse Challenge

This short project came from a shooting challenge we had with Professor Santiago in our Advanced Non-Fiction Story telling class.

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The Task

The task was simple: Create three moving hyperlapses and three still ones, but I wanted to challenge myself to something more. I didn't want to shoot video for this so I decided to take every single photo togethor and stitch it togethor to create a video. This required a little bit of some math and some time on my end but I wanted to see If I was able to do it.

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Pre Production

Before even shooting anything I had to first identify the locations and see if they were ideal to even shoot from. I knew the prompt stated that each one had to be roughly 10 seconds long. So this is where I had to do some math. I decided on a 24 fps timeline which meant I would need 24 photos to make one second of video. From there I multiplied 24x10 and got 240. So at a minimum, I need to take 240 photos for exactly 10 seconds of video. I decided to go with my 24mm lens because it gives it that weird looking barrel distortion as you get closer to the larger image making appear more than lifelike.

Production

During production I had to make sure I stuck by some strict rules. I needed to first make sure I had a central focus point for each hyperlapes, so for the first one It was the clock and the second was the top of the building. To ensure I was able to do this I set me grids up on my camera and got as close as possible to the central focul point with every photo. The other strict rule was the rythm of the photos. I kept the camera in the same exact spot took a photo and moved one step infront and took another photo. It was important during this phase to make sure that was consist with how long I took between each photo so It wouldnt look weird in the timing of the video.

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Post Production

I did do a considerable amount of post production on this to acheive the final look. Using After Effects, I imported all the photos as sequence, then color graded them all to get my desired look. Once the clips were on the timeline I made tracking points with the camera to make the central point smoother. After all the photos were tracked to a single point I used warp stablization to make the images even smoother to acheive the final look. Added a bit more color grading to the clips in After Effects, slapped on a trending song and added some film grain to it. For the reversal on the first one I nested the entire sequence at the last frame and create a reverse time remap to make it go back to its orginal point.

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