P5: Time-lapse

It is accurate to credit Eadweard Muybridge with the early stages of time-lapse photography, demonstrated by his work of a horse captured frame by frame in motion. His work preceded the celluloid film-strip we use today. Rumor has it that in order to settle a wager of whether a running horse is briefly mid-air with all four hooves losing contact with the ground, Muybridge setup a complicated rigging of 24 cameras. He used trip wires to trigger the shutters of the cameras as it strode by. Once strung together, of course, a “moving picture” was created which revealed that all the hooves do, in fact, actually leave the ground.Today, film is typically captured at 24 or, in some HD applications, even 60 frames-per-second. By stringing the images together rapidly of course, you get the feeling of seamless motion. When we talk about time lapse, in contrast to what Muybridge was attempting, slowing down a real event, we are more interested in speeding up an event. Although you still string multiple images together, as in the Muybridge experiment, the difference is that you program the camera to pause slightly between each photo. You then run these frames together at a common speed, i.e. 24 frames per second. By doing this, you create the illusion of watching an event occur many times faster than it did. The first recorded use of this technique was done by the cinemagician Georges Méliès in a feature film called Carrefour De L’Opera in 1897. Of course many others soon followed.

Brief/Criteria
For this project, you will choose a moving subject-matter which motion can be displayed in a video format. The video must be composed of time-lapse photography (a few hundreds (or thousands) of shots) compiled and edited with software (iMovie), exported as QuickTime movie. By default, a time-lapse photography project is inherently conceptual, and deals with the idea of time compression (or extension). So think in terms of time being extended over time itself. Events which take a certain amount of time to happen, but can be displayed in shorter time spam: clouds moving on the sky, sun rising/sunset, cars on streets, analog clock hands, etc.

Deadline
Tuesday, April 24th

Student Samples

Routine by Erika Ito

by Kelcie Broom

More Samples/resources
Ross Ching (also, make sure to watch his making of video)
http://rossching.com/eclectic30

Nicole Young (teaches how to do time-lapse video)
http://vimeo.com/3340273

Timescapes (beautifully made, landscape photography)
http://timescapes.org/

Brian Stark (art & design alumnus)
http://vimeo.com/user3337735