Tag Archive for "stop motion"
Although my initial investigations into time-lapse photography were done on film back in 2004, my interest has still been there in recent years, and even more so since I got my first digital camera in late 2006.
Although I have been looking to do something that involves a series of continuous and rapid shots, I found that you can buy intervalometers fairly cheaply on eBay and so bought one a few weeks ago. The intervalometer can be used to set the time until the first photo is taken, the interval between photos and the total number of photos taken. As such, it is suited to more traditional time-lapse photography where the camera is set up and left to take a series of photos over a length of time.
The first time-lapse video that I made with my camera was the view from our lounge window, looking across the river towards the ferry stop at Bulimba. I set the intervalmoter to take a photo every 10 seconds and to take 399 photos. This is the maximum specified number of photos that can be taken with it, although it can be set to run until the memory card is full. Using a the rate of 1 photo every 10 seconds meant that it photographed the view of the river for just over an hour.
Having taken the photos I used the free version of Animator DV+ to animate the 399 still photos. I set the photos to play back at a rate of 15 frames per second, giving about 26 seconds of footage.
The video looked like this:
I took another series of photos out of the front room window, looking upstream this time, although somehow I managed to mess it up and manage to include part of the window frame in the shot…
After having done the 26 second movie looking upstream, using the intervalometer set to 399 shots, I repeated the downstream time-lapse with the intervalometer set to run until the memory card was full. I used the same setting as before, with a photo being taken every 10 seconds. In addition to creating a longer movie I also wanted to assess the camera settings as the sky got darker. I used a film speed of 200 ISO, an aperture of f8 and a shutter speed of 1/160. At the time I started this time-lapse this was slightly over-exposing each shot; I hoped by doing this that I would get more shots as it became darker.
At about 30 seconds into the time-lapse movie it suddenly gets dark. This was as a result of a storm moving in. The photos get darker and darker until the light outside became too dark that the camera couldn’t focus (I had set it on auto focus as opposed to manual focus).
The storm started very soon after this. I set the camera up to try to record this, however in my haste I didn’t change the ISO speed, with it left at the 200 ISO I had been using earlier. Although I changed the camera from manual to aperture mode, so that the shutter speed could change as the light deteriorated to give a correct exposure, this meant that almost from when I started taking the photos the shutter speed started to increase up to 10 seconds. For reasons unknown the camera also froze soon into the movie, although this was rectified by turning it off and back on again. I didn’t get very far into taking shots when the rain became so bad that the wind was blowing it back into our front room and all over my camera.
A blink and you miss it 3 seconds of storm… (the last frame is after I’d shut the window…)
Looking forward to the wet season; hopefully they’ll be some interesting storms to capture.
For a long time I’ve been interested in time-lapse photography and stop motion animation with normal still cameras.
Back in 2004, when I was doing my part-time two year photography course at SCOLA, I did a couple of my projects based on these topics.
For one project I looked to make a music video using still photos for My First Knife Fight, a London band that I had used for another of my photography projects in the first year of my course. I was looking to create something akin to Michel Gondry’s video for the Rolling Stones’ cover of ‘Like A Rolling Stone‘.
In preparation for what I had in mind I did some test shots with my friend Wim. The test shots were done on a film camera, which proved somewhat problematic as the camera continuous film advance kept sticking as the film wound on and so the interval between shots became a bit more irregular. The camera should have been able to do 3 Frames Per Second (FPS) but with these problems the FPS kept varying. This would have made it problematic in terms of syncing the images to be in time with the music. And doing all of this on a film camera, I didn’t have the luxury of being able to delete and try again, like you would have with a digital camera these days, but did have the expense of using film and the time that it required to develop the film and scan the negatives in…
I scanned in the negatives for the best sequence of still photos that I managed to get during the test shots and imported them into Macromedia Director in order to animate the stills. When played normally the motion was very jerky.
In order to smooth the animation I overlaid the photos in Director’s timeline, i.e. the first photo overlapped the second photo slightly in the timeline, the second overlapped the third etc. Then I set the transparency of each photo to fade out as the next photo in the sequence faded in. The effect was a lot more successful and more in mind with what I was looking to achieve.
However, the band were having issues and about to split, so nothing ever came of taking what I had learnt during the test shots and doing a shoot to get the images for a full video.
As a result, I just ended up using a whole load of still images that I had taken of the band over the course of a year and putting them to music so that I could finish the project for my course. I was waiting on the band to provide me with an mp3 of one of their songs to use but it didn’t eventuate before the band split. Needing a song to complete the project, and this being in the days before every band had a Myspace page with some of their songs on it, I scoured as many random and little known songs as I could find in order to get a song I could pass off as a My First Knife Fight song to accompany the video.
I eventually found a song that was quite short, at well under 3 minutes (and so cut down my workload), had a grungy sound like My First Knife Fight and, coming from a friend in London’s Triple J Hottest 100 compilation, would be largely unknown in the UK. Trouble is that I moved to Australia in mid-2004 and ‘Berlin Chair‘ by You Am I is slightly better known here than in the UK… In putting the final video together I did a series of tests to sort out the best method to use. Below is the final trial and the method that I ended up using for the full video. There are a couple of mistakes in this test but it gives an idea of what the final video looked like.