I’ve played around with time-lapse in the past, but I’ve never put together an entire video. So while I was in Destin, Florida for a few weeks, I decided to give it a go.
Shooting the time-lapse itself was a blast. I decided to make it a tilt shift video, so it was fun to try and find subjects to shoot that might look good as miniatures. Unfortunately, some of the angles weren’t ideal for tilt shift, and some of the shots were too close up to the people, so they didn’t quite look as miniature as I wanted.
I think my favorite shots are the single anchored boat and the woman sitting by herself on the pier. That lady looked a little down, and she definitely had some things on her mind, so it was kind of interesting to watch her sitting there.
In all, I think I had about 13,000 stills that I took that day. Obviously, I didn’t use a lot of them for this video. Some had horrible flickering issues, some had bad angles, and others just didn’t make for good tilt shift shots. Speaking of which, the sequences from the boat ride were also some of my favorite, but obviously were not tilt shift. I ended up taking a shot every second, not knowing how long it was going to take us to get to our destination, but it ended up being way too many shots. So I had to set the time lapse for 30fps and I still ended up cutting out about 75% of that entire boat ride.
The flickering was my biggest issue while editing this in post. I couldn’t figure out a good way to solve this issue, and after reading a ton of tutorials and reviews on deflicker plug-ins, I came across a solution. It wasn’t the quickest way to solve this problem, but it did help a lot. A gentleman named Chris on the timescapes.org forum wrote up a Photoshop script. I tried it out and it worked pretty well for most of my sequences with flicker, but not all. However, I will say that I probably didn’t use it to its fullest potential, so it may work even better than it did for me (I was in a rush because I wanted to get this done before I left Atlanta for three months to go to Europe). So here’s a link to the thread with the deflicker script. Make sure you read the entire thread because there are multiple versions of this script available for download, each one an improvement on the previous one.
At any rate, I had a blast making this video. I know I probably missed some steps somewhere, either while shooting or in post, but I’m planning on doing a lot of these in the future, so hopefully I’ll become more efficient and put out better quality in the end. I hope you guys enjoy this one and please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions on how I could’ve done something better. Thanks for watching!
(By the way, the gallery above are frame grabs from the video itself, so apologies for the quality. The uncompressed still shots were actually pretty nice.)