today we went to christchurch to shoot some timelapses from the church tower. i had managed to get special permission for us to be taken up the church tower. it was higher than i thought it would be and was also very windy. we had manfrotto pro tripod that seemed to do the trick but a sandbag or two would have been useful. most of the shots are fairly steady and we manged to get about 5 different shots.
two stills of the setup:
left – the may look unstable but it was actually ok. we did have to stay be careful where we walked while the camera was rolling as the planks wobbled when we stood on them.
right – we had difficulty viewing the screen on my camera because outdoors in midday sunlight it is highly reflective. i composed the shots using the viewfinder first, before changing over to morror lock-up / live view mode.
below are 5 unedited screenshots of the footage:
the constant movement of traffic between the georgian architecture made this a nice shot. its a shame about the ugly building behind the church but that will almost certainly be a blured out area of the image
we initially thought this would make a nice shot because of the constant movement of the people through the gate. however when we played it back we realised the gate was quite ugly and there wasn’t really enough people moving through the shot to make it usable. the shot actually looked better with the gate composed at the top of the image but that would mean the foreground of the image would be the graveyard which would not have really been appropriate.
there was plenty of people walking through the park as well as a few boats moving in the harbour for the 12 minute duration of this shot. there’s also a big open space in the middle where the typography will fit nicely. this one’s definitely winner.
i haven’t actually sped this one up in after effects yet so i don’t know exactly what it looks like but i think the boats gradually float towards the land and then back out. we were running out of time with this one so only had it the camera rolling for about 5 minutes. because the movement is so slow we really needed to leave it running for longer but i think this will still be a usable one. like the park shot it has a big open space where we can float some typography.
this final shot is probably one of the best – lots of traffic passing over the bridge – could probably put the text on the bridge or maybe on the front of the castle.
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