Timelapse shots are surprisingly not as easy to make than I had thought.
While exploring the city I found that the best locations for a timelapse shoot in a city tend to be places with high traffic and days with blue skies (best served with clouds). This is because if I were to shoot a stationary object with nothing moving in it, it would just be a…well…a picture. For this sketch I have juxtapositioned 2 timelapse shoots. Looking back on it I wish I shot the first one during the night as the scene seems very bland during the day. A problem with this is that I shot this in RMIT Bldg. 80 on the tenth floor, and I assume that it would be closed come night time. This means that access to certain locations with good shooting value can be restrictive. Or maybe I’m just not very good at finding high shooting spots like rooftops with free access in the city. So if you’re gonna shoot something in timelapse, find a place that’s open to the public at all times. It also didn’t help that there was a glass wall in front of my camera which resulted in the birth of that annoying light reflection flare in the video. Thanks to that I had to rely on my camera’s AUTO function be which meant I had no control over how the scene looks.
For the next shoot, I chose a nice quiet spot next to the South Yarra river. I had to move the camera several times in order to find that sweet spot (good angle, good framing, no obstructing objects) and this took a good 15 minutes. I had originally planned to shoot this part of the video as it transitioned from day (more specifically during sunset) to night. Unfortunately, my camera was on the verge of dying as its battery sat on its last bar of energy. This is totally due to my lack of preparation. Which brings us to the next part of why timelapse videos aren’t easy to make; they’re time consuming. Unless you’re shooting it in a private space or you’re not worried about letting someone nick your camera when you go to the bathroom, you absolutely have to sit next to it during the whole shoot. Of course, this is only if you’re by yourself. So if you ever plan to shoot for an hour or two, bring along a friend you trust.
A question that came to mind when I made this; why not just speed it up by increasing the speed duration? Why timelapse? I’ve done both to answer this and simply put, timelapse is better for long duration shots because it’s much, much faster than when sped up.
Narrative-wise, timelapse scenes such as the ones in my video are great as exposition shots. This is because they are framed in a wide shot as opposed to a close-up. The viewer can more or less get an idea of where they are and just how busy that area can be. It’s very important to consider how a shot is framed for a timelapse as well as how long you want it to be at the end. In our example, the timelapse shots usually go for about 5-7 seconds so I’ve chose 6 seconds as the minimum for the video.