Vertigo Hyperlapse [34th of 52 Timelapse Project]

Hyperlapse is a great technique for creating long, complicated shots. This week I’ve got a little bit more complicated shot. It was quite interesting how I finally got this shot. It’s from Pszczyna, a small town located about 20km from my home town. It has a beautiful park with a nice castle. I decided to shoot a small video there (basically for a contest, sometimes I need that kind of motivation ;)). This is my second try of ending shot for this video, because the first one was accidentally deleted from the card, when I was very sleepy shooting sunrise. So I decided to go to Pszczyna once again and this shot is way better than the previous one 😉 Check out the video below and then read a little how-to.

This shot took about 1,5h on the location and three different lenses. Actually, it was the first time I shot a hyperlapse with a 200mm lens (~300mm equivalent) and I love the effect 😉 At the right location, longer lenses look awesome. Hyperlapses are usually shot with a wide angle lenses, so this makes a really different feel than things, that people used to watch. So this shot contains a few parts:

1. Static timelapse @200mm
2. A simple hyperlapse @200mm
3. A dolly zoom shot – 200mm – 10mm
4. Holy grail (day to night) hyperlapse.

The first part is pretty obvious. I used 2″ shutter speed, 3 sec interval and just put a camera on the tripod. In the hyperlapse part I didn’t use intervalometer, but I did use 2 sec self timer to avoid camera shake. With such long focal length and long shutter speed you’ve got to be super precise. More about shooting hyperlapse you’ll find in my tutorial: How to shoot hyperlapse [TUTORIAL].

Such dramatic dolly zoom shot requires really wide focal lengths range. I’ve used three lenses:

• Tamron 55-200mm
• Canon kit lens 18-55mm
• Sigma 10-20mm

This technique is described in details in my tutorial Hyperlapse Dolly Zoom [TUTORIAL]. In this shot I used Canon 550D and I was shooting in live view mode. In the picture below you can see a grid that was pretty much what I used to position the camera. There are two circles: the middle one was a classic hyperlapse reference point (the point I was constantly pointing the camera adjusting the pan and tilt). The left circle is a point I used for a vertigo effect (not the biker, ending of the dark line on the ground). After positioning the camera on the reference point, I was zooming out the lens, so the vertical grid line sticks to the dark ground line. And that’s it 😉

After dolly zoom shot we’ve got a day to night hyperlapse. For that I used an intervalometer set to 30 seconds to be sure I got the transition to the dark night (normally I shoot quicker than 1 shot per 30sec ;)). If you have ever shot a holy grail timelapse – that’s pretty much it, but you move the tripod. So, I was manually changing the exposure settings to get the correct exposure. More about holy grail technique in my tutorial: Day to Night – Holy Grail Technique [19th of 52 Timelapse Project].

Post udostępniony przez Tomasz Walczak (@tlvideo) 27 Sie, 2017 o 4:17 PDT

Post production of this shot was quite simple. Of course I used LRTimelapse to compensate the exposure jumps. Warp Stabilizer do a great job in stabilizing this long sequence. Of course I didn’t put Warp on the whole sequence. I divide it into 4 sections, same as described above. Stabilizers have problem when things change drastically like static timelapse to hyperlapse or classic hyperlapse to dolly zoom shot, so it’s better to stabilize those independently.

That’s all for now. Don’t forget to share your timelapses on my Facebook group: http://facebook.com/groups/timelapse.hyperlapse

See you next week!