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As regular readers of the blog are aware, I’ve toyed around many times with time-lapse videos made with my DSLR cameras. This past weekend in Ottawa, I decided to be a bit more ambitious and make a video with a little variety instead of the static scenes I usually shoot.

The majority of this video was shot in about three hours on the grounds and surroundings of Parliament Hill. Over 4,000 frames garnered me about 90 seconds of footage, which I edited down to 1m25s including intro and outro titles, music, and a few seconds of regular non-time-lapse HD video.

The big swath of fire in the video is known as the Centennial Flame.

Everything was shot on a Nikon D300S with battery grip, set on a Manfrotto tripod. As good as the tripod is, the wind kicked up some fierce gusts that night, which resulted in some video jitter on the longer (200mm) shots.

After tweaking the photos in Lightroom and cropping to 16:9, I pulled each batch of JPEGs into QuickTime Player 7 Pro, which output my working movie files. I used iMovie to glue the whole mess together with movies and titles. I’d never used iMovie for anything more complicated than adding a soundtrack to existing video, but I found the whole process incredibly easy.

Now that I’m a lot more comfortable with the editing process, I have a strong inclination to make one of these vids featuring Toronto… We’ll see.

Music: “Yeah (Pretentious Version)” by LCD Soundsystem

The studio is in Bowmanville, which is a long trek for me, but totally worth it. A couple weeks ago, I shot a familiar face for those of you who follow the blog — Samantha. I’ve only processed one shot from the shoot so far:

The pose and outfit was Sam’s idea. I lit her with an Alien Bees 1600 strobe in a Photoflex softbox, up high to camera right. The background is dark grey seamless paper, lit with a Nikon SB-800 on a tripod. The SB-800′s zoom head was set to about 135mm, for a narrow beam of light across the background, just enough to give Sam some separation.

But I also did another fun time-lapse video:

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The video is composed of 2,290 separate pictures, glued together using QuickTime Pro (version 7, as they’ve stripped this functionality out of the newer versions). I was using my ancient Nikon D70S tethered to a MacBook Pro running Sofortbild. Because the D70S doesn’t have an intervalometer built in, the Sofortbild software is necessary to accomplish pictures at set intervals. Despite setting the intervals to one second, I ended up with photos that were five seconds apart. I suspect this is due to the D70S’s slow buffering, processing, and/or transfer speeds, but I don’t know for sure as I have no real way to test it.

Music: Anger (Rare Force 2 Meg Mix) by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

I’ve posted photos from this shoot before, but now you can glimpse behind the scenes to see how it was done in this time lapse video.

Model: Randall Sutton. Music: “Lovely Allen” by Holy Fuck.

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Photo: Ryan Visima (moi); Layout and Design: Jake; Models: Georgie Gates (Dana Bondy), The Carpenter (Dave Lapsley); Makeup: Angela McQueen

The goal was a Harlequin romance novel level of cheesiness, and I think we hit it big time. Check out the lighting setup:

Dana and Dave are on a dark grey seamless backdrop. The main light was an Alien Bees 1600 in a 24×36 softbox. The rim light was a Nikon SB-900 at full power, with a warm orange gel, to simulate Dana and Dave being lit up by the romantic fire that rages behind them. The reflector in the bottom right corner actually wasn’t to reflect any light at all — we used it as an impromptu wind machine. La Minouche (Catherine Skinner) waved it furiously for the better part of half an hour! The image was also flipped on the horizontal axis in post, which is why the diagram doesn’t match up with the light sources in the photo.

Back to Les Coquettes… It’s an exciting season for a couple reasons. First up is a new venue, the Lower Ossington Theatre. The shot above was produced in one of the rehearsal facilities at the LOT.

I recently got a new camera (Nikon D300s), so my old Nikon D200 has been relegated to backup status. That makes it perfect for things like time lapse videos, so I made a little behind-the-scenes magic for your enjoyment. It stops just short of where we actually started shooting the poster content. The camera’s intervalometer was set to 4 second intervals and I took 1,486 shots between 8:00pm and 9:40pm. It’s being played back at 24fps.

The second exciting reason is a new venture in tiered ticket prices and fundraising. The layout of the venue provides some flexibility in terms of seating, so there’s three different price levels — proceeds from the upper price tier are going towards the Toronto Youth Theatre.

Best of all, Love Story is being presented twice in one night — each show being slightly different from the other. Want to see a bawdy night of burlesque and then have a romantic Valentine’s dinner after the show? Go for it — the first show is at 7pm. Prefer to eat first and be entertained later? That’s cool too, because the late show starts at 9:30.

This is awesome for me, the photographer, who usually can’t enjoy the full spectrum of the show when seeing it through my viewfinder. So I’ll get to watch one show and photograph the other.

The show is three weeks away, but tickets are already selling out. See you there!

Time lapse in Montreal, August 2008.

These are my friends Rose-Anne and James, waiting for me to setup lights to shoot Rose with.

An interesting night it was. James and I have been partners in crime on various projects over the course of many, many years, and our setup here with Rose was the result of a long, hot, wild evening. It started out ambitiously; at the time, as a designer for CHUM, James was tasked with all sorts of print and broadcast graphics projects, including one for Canadian network SexTV.

The goal: produce a short opening credits video introduction for a television show called Voyeur.

The idea: find a seedy 1970s-style motel room and take various still shots of a model that would be later stitched together in a pseudo stop-motion animated style video for the introduction.

James described the idea in detail to me and I knew Rose would be a perfect fit. After brief introductions, we hopped into my car, trunk brimming with photo gear, and set out on our mission to find a seedy motel room in Toronto’s southeast end. The night was hot and humid, sticky and sweaty. We stopped in to motel after motel, carefully scoping out each from the safety of the car, and sometimes venturing outside to get a better look at rooms and decor. Nothing fit the bill. We spent close to two hours, progressively driving further away from home, in search of the perfect wood-paneled motel interior. We decided to try one last place before turning back and coming up with an alternative plan. Our hopes were quickly dashed, however, when we pulled into a parking lot of a motel and saw a police car there. Thinking that this was a bad omen, I turned the car around and headed for the exit… only to have the cops pull in front of it and barricade us in the parking lot.

Uh oh.

Two cops got out and each went to opposite sides of my car. The blistering hot air poured in to the car as we rolled down the windows. Rose was sitting next to me in the passenger seat, and James was in the back. The barrage of questions began…

Where are you from? Why are you here? How do you know each other? Don’t you know how dangerous it is here? Why are you here? WHY ARE YOU HERE?

Rose was cool as a cucumber, having had a run-in or two with police on previous occasions. While I too had been questioned by cops before, I was still panicking a bit inside, though we’d done nothing wrong. Answering “why are you here?” proved more difficult than it should have. There was no easy way to explain that the two guys in the car were about to photograph a naked girl in a sleazy motel for a sex-based television network. I deftly handed the responsibility of explaining that to James, who did an admirable job — at which point they asked for his ID.

Uh oh. Now what?

The cops go back to their car to run the ID, leaving us to sit and wonder what horrible crime James has committed that will land him jail. Excruciating amounts of time go by before the cops return to the car and explain to us what’s going on. They were looking for a suspect and they had a photo. It was a white guy. Tall. Skinny. Shaved head. Named James. See photo above of James: white, tall, skinny, shaved head. Luckily not the same guy, but a close call all the same.

They let us go, but not without a stern warning, punctuated with some very colourful language, to never return to this motel. They then followed us for a couple kilometers to make sure we really were leaving.

Plan B? Go to the other end of the city where slightly less seedy motels were likely to be found. Another half-hour drive results in us being stuck in a traffic jam of epic proportions at 11pm. At this point, a good three or four hours after we started, the terrible trio admitted defeat and we sheepishly returned home.

Lo and behold — and why none of us realized it is still a mystery to this day — James had the perfect wood-paneling look already in his bedroom.

Sigh.

Photos from the shoot coming soon!