<![CDATA[For the past couple of years I've had the dubious honour of being asked to produce the Christmas e-card for the Herald & Times Group. It's always a tricky brief – produce a seasonal e-card without dragging myself or others away from a busy schedule.
In previous years I've just pulled together a picture, some clip art and a Christmas-y tune in Flash to make something like this: http://www.heraldandtimeslabs.com/christmas2010/
…which is OK, but not very exciting. So this year, I decided to try something different.
Over the space of a week I took around 3,500 still photos around our Glasgow office and Cambuslang print plant. I then stitched these photos together using a free Mac app called Time Lapse Assembler to produce a pretty smooth 30 frames/sec timelapse video. In turn, this was edited to match an appropriate Christmas tune in iMovie. Here’s the result…
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Two cameras were used on the shoot. Most of the pics came from my Nikon D3100 using both an 18-55mm zoom and an 8mm fish eye for the really wide angle shots. Interval timing was handled by a great little remote shutter release I got off eBay for about £15. It does everything the official Nikon one does for about a tenth of the price.
My backup camera was a Ricoh CX1 which I used to capture a second angle while the D3100 was in use (like when the drivers were loading their trucks and while everyone gathered for the final “Merry Christmas” shot).
In total I reckon I spent approx four hours shooting the pics (elapsed time was more like 18 hours, but most of the time I could leave the camera and get on with other work) and then about another three hours assembling the footage and editing in iMovie. So, for less than a day’s work — or about the same as I’d have spent creating another cheesy Santa animation — I reckon we got a much better result.
Producing this video has really given me the timelapse bug, so for Christmas I’m getting a custom-built robotic tripod head which will allow me to combine real tilts and pans with my timelapse photography. Exciting stuff!