This week’s shot is something I came up with while watching Syrp Slingshot promo materials (it’s a cablecam system designed for timelapse). I wanted to shoot a slider shot over a river – with my 1,5m (5′) long slider, the most resonable option was to get into the river 😉
This is a shot from my 52 Timelapse Project. You can check out the details of the project or full list of the shots.
So, basically this shot was shot with upside-down mounted slider and a 3 axis stabilizer, which provides pan and tilt movement to the camera. I used an Alexmos controller timelapse feature to do this, check out my tutorial on that here: 3 Axis Gimbal – Timelapse Feature [VIDEO TUTORIAL]
Shooting
Of course it would be better to use a proper 3 axis motion control device for timelapse, but these are pretty expensive, so this method is rather for people who, like me, already have a gimbal and a slider 😉
To make this shot I had to use wellingtons to get into river, because it’s still too cold here, in Poland 😉 I hadn’t put a tripod into the river before, so I didn’t know what to expect. Fortunately, both tripods stood pretty stable, so I decided to put there also a light stand with my second camera for behind the scene shot (I run out of tripods, so I’ve got to use lightstand, but it works quite good for less important shots) 😉
Combining a gimbal with a slider will depend on what slider you have, for me it was as follows:
- Go to the end point on slider
- Frame the last picture with a gimbal
- Without moving a gimbal go to the starting point
- Active timelapse motion feature in the gimbal and set up the first frame
- Run the slider
Because I used my slider in shoot-move-shoot mode (continuous movement is too fast in my device), the camera should be connected to the slider controler to release the shutter.
To match the slider and the gimbal movement you’ve got to do some math (but it’s super simple ;)). I wanted to take 200 pictures (8 second final clip) at 1″ shutter speed. The gimbal can swing a little bit just after the slider movement, so I added additional 2 seconds to be sure it’s not moving during the exposure. It gave me an interval of 3 seconds. Now, 3 sec interval and 200 pictures gives us 3 * 200 = 600 sec (10 min) – that’s how long the slider movement will be. The last step is just to use that in the timelapse motion parameters in the Simple BGC (or other software, if your gimbal is able to shoot timelapse), because gimbal movement has to be the same duration.
Camera settings
For this shot I used Panasonic GH4 with a Speedbooster and Sigma 18-35mm lens (@35mm) and Hoya ProND 1000 (10 stops of light loss). The exposure parameters were as follows:
- Shutter speed 1″
- Aperture f/2
- ISO 200
Post Production
Of course I’ve edited the RAW files in Lightroom and then imported JPGs to the After Effetcs. The result was quite good, but I still used a Warp Stabilizer to make it better. These kind of shots are super simple to stabilize for Warp 😉 The second thing I did in AE was time reversing the clip – the reversed water looks the same on timelapse and I prefer to go from the detail to the wider shot 🙂
If you like the shots, please leave a comment 🙂 I like to see that someone reads these articles 😉 Also, as always, you can share your shots or videos on my Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/timelapse.hyperlapse/
See you next week!
2 Comments
I read it 😉
Awesome 😀