Following the boat [26th of 52 Timelapse Project]

And here it is, I’ve reached the half of the project! Since I’ve got some summer projects now, it’s getting harder and harder to prepare everything for the project, but I won’t give up 😉 This week I’ve got something from the beautiful lake I visited last week for a small vacation. It was shot with just a tripod 😉 Check out the shot and then read my small explanation.

For some reason I really enjoy shooting boats. For this shot I wanted to start with a view on one castle and end up with the second castle with a smooth transition by following the boat. To make it more interesting I changed the focal lenght of the lens during the shot. I used my Panasonic GH4 with a native 14-140 lens to get a nice ‘zoom’. Of course I didn’t use any motorized head, it was shot with just a tripod with a video head. I manually followed the boat moving the camera with intervalometer turned on 🙂 At the end of the shot you can see that the field of view becomes wider. It’s not a post production zoom (it would be possible to do it like this), but an in-camera effect 🙂 You’ve got to manually rotate the focal length ring on the lens. People always ask me how much to rotate it. The answer is: as little as possible. The effect depends on the lens you have, but if you follow my guides it should look good 😉

Post Production

Of course, the footage needs  some stabilization. In this shot I combined two different methods of stabilization for different parts. For the boat I recommend to use Stabilize motion in After Effects. You’ve got to track some point on the boat, pretty much any.  The zooming part won’t work with that, the Warp Stabilizer works best here.  Usually with deafult settings 😉 After the stabilization you have to adjust the parts, where the shots join toghether. Adjust just position of one or both clips and it should be fine 😉

These kind of shots can be interesing for any kind of project. It’s good to test it by yourself 😉 Share the results on my Facebook group: http://facebook.com/groups/timelapse.hyperlapse

See you next week!