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Time Lapses – Advice and Examples

I’m obsessed.

I bought a gorillapod tripod for my phone so I could record the occasional introduction to my tutorials – but then I tried making a time lapse.

I loved how it looked, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I wanted to share some of my experiences, and some of the time lapses I’ve made so that you can use them with my Blender Tutorial for Making Awesome Miniature Fakes.

Here’s my advice:

  • Get a tripod, or lean your phone / camera on something sturdy to get a steady shot.
  • No matter how steady you think your camera is, stabilise your footage afterwards. I show you how to do this in Blender in the tutorial above. This gets rid of subtle movements that happen over minutes that become obvious in a time lapse.
  • If you’re using an iPhone, you’re lucky because the camera app has a time-lapse feature built in. On Android, I use an app called “Frame Lapse”
  • How much you speed up your scenes is a matter of taste – I find that taking a picture every second (roughly a 30 times speedup) works well for a lot of situations. Slower things like cloud movements need more of a speedup – about 1 picture every 5 seconds.

So, what you came here for. Here are my time lapses for you to play with (I’ve hosted them on my Patreon page for convenience, but you don’t need to be a supporter to access them): 

http://www.patreon.com/posts/6983768

Published in Motion Tutorials