Chris Balcer’s Videomaker Report

In this article, the filming technique being discussed was time lapse. Time lapse was described as almost the opposite of slow-motion video, in which short events are made to take up more space to appear more important. With time lapse, much larger events (say, twenty-four hours of constant filming) are minimized into far more manageable and watchable lengths. This enables a slow event, such as a flower growing; or a large, important event that takes a lot of time, such as a painter at work; to reach out to the masses and connect with them with three minutes of video instead of five hours.
The two techniques discussed were both very different, and yet somewhat similar. The first of the two was in-camera time lapse, where the camera is set to activate every minute, shoot a second of footage, and then go back into standby mode. It repeats until it runs out of battery, film, or suffers from a critical hardware fault. The second mode, post-production time lapse, differs from the first in that the camera remains on and filming for the length of time needed, and the footage is simply sped up to the desired length in post-production editing software. The two techniques are similar in results, and the fact that they both need a stable camera and a lot of film.
I already knew about post-production time lapse, in fact I had used this on my final video for Video Production I, the scene where Alex is walking down the hallway and back. However, if I have time this year, I would like to experiment with in-camera time lapse, as that may have some interesting effects. However, limitations of this would be that the greatest time lapses occur outside, and leaving Miss Shaw’s cameras outside for an extended period of time does not increase my chances of avoiding premature dismemberment.