Sunday, January 17, 2016

Acquainted with the Night


I've been having a lot of fun playing with the time-lapse feature on my gopro. It can make some really fun road trip videos, even condensing a whole vacation into a few minutes.

The week started with me trying out a new time-lapse experiment. I set up my gopro in a window and let it go for three-ish days.

Then the camera moved slightly so I decided to stop it and see how it looked.

I have to get better at framing these shots, I always underestimate just how wide the shot will be. But on top of the poor framing, the video was just... so boring. I condensed it into less than 30 seconds, but the result was still incredibly boring.



I wanted to see if it was the framing that made it so uninteresting so I set the camera outside and let it go for the remainder of the day.

The footage was mildly interesting. Clouds came and went, it rained a bit, the camera fell. But it still felt rather dull.



My thought was that it had to do with the lack of a reference. When there's nothing that we're used to seeing happen at normal speed, it's hard to understand how fast things are. Even in the first video with the sun coming and leaving, it's just hard to appreciate that those are entire days passing when nothing else is in the shot.

So I set the camera to take pictures of my desk. I wanted to see if me working on random things or watching videos and just living added anything to the idea of a multi-day time-lapse. I also made sure that there was always light on so the video never went completely black.

I think it came out better than the previous videos, but I don't know by how much.



The video is interesting, but I think it might still be a little too mundane. I think unless I add some more things, maybe a few days layered on top of each other or something to make it seem more interesting than just a dull day, the idea of a mundane time-lapse might be a bust.

I'll probably try it one more time before giving up the idea, but it's interesting how wrong I was about hidden things being found when the mundane is sped up.

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