Time Lapses, or what I've been up to the last 4 weeks

A set of time lapses from my trip to Israel and Hong Kong. Plus a couple from Melbourne. Music by Cinephonix

So for anyone who was following on social media during my last trip, you would have seen lots of pictures of my camera while I set up a bunch of time lapses. I was experimenting and seeing what works, what doesn’t work, what I like and what I don’t like.

The GH4 has a fantastic time-lapse function built in and I had the Edelkrone motion unit with me, which also makes it really easy to take time lapses. So all you have to work out is what shutter speed you want to shoot at and the interval at which you want to shoot.

Your shutter speed will decide how movement looks in your time-lapse. I find a one-second exposure gives me just the right amount of blur and doesn’t overexpose with my ND filter dialled to the max :)

If you want less blur, but still have a bit of it, go for a shutter speed of 1/6. 

Then there is the interval. I find a shot every six seconds works well for landscape time-lapses, which ends up being most time-lapses!

The other thing I learnt is that when you’re shooting anything with a slider, you want to have something in the foreground. You’ll notice for example in my video of the time-lapse out the window in Wan Chai, you don’t notice that it was done on a slider until you see the window frames come into, well, frame. You need to have an element in the foreground, close to the camera, to accentuate the movement otherwise it can be too subtle to be noticed at all.

You’ll notice in most of the sideways moving sliders I always had the ground or something in the foreground so that the viewer can see that the camera is moving.

I’ve also created a short tutorial below about how to take your images and then put them together in FCPX, enjoy :)

A short tutorial showing you how to easily create a time-lapse in FCPX

Mikey Jaffa

My super talented brother, passing the time whilst I expermient with Time Lapse.

Last time we were in Israel, my brother Mikey took us to this amazing hummus place in Jaffa and we were really keen to go back this time. I also wanted to take my gear down to the waterfront in Jaffa and experiment with some time-lapse stuff.

The hummus was amazing, as always :) After filling our bellies, we headed down to the waterfront. There was a lovely spot to set up my 3Leggedthing Eric along with my GH4 and Edelkrone slider. Unfortunately, I forgot to pack my remote cable so I couldn’t use the Edelkrone motion unit to control the timing on the GH4 time-lapse. Luckily, the GH4 has a great in-built time-lapse function, so while the movement wouldn’t look 100% “right”, it wouldn’t be too bad.

So we set up and had about 20 minutes to wait for the time-lapse to complete. My brother is a passionate and very talented musician, so he pulled out his guitar and, in the beautiful weather, sat on the sea wall and played. He was doing his thing so I grabbed my A7s, slapped on a ND filter, and did my thing.

Initially I thought I would just set up my DR40 next to him to record audio of what he was playing, but I was getting way too much wind noise on it and didn’t have my dead cat handy.

Sidenote: here is an important lesson! NEVER trust your audio meters - always have a set of headphones handy and listen to your audio because there can always be issues your meters won’t tell you about.

To combat the wind, I grabbed my wireless lab mic and just stuck it to his shirt. While we still got a bit of sea noise, his playing was clearer by far.

He played away and I just shot various angles and experimented a bit with compositions and pull focuses. Normally I try to hold my shot steady for about 10-15 seconds, then reposition. But then I would have only had 10-15 sound bites of his audio. So I decided to just keep recording and then cut in the first few short shots I had gotten before I decided to “shoot long”.

Once I got the footage onto the timeline in Final Cut, I realised that what I should have done was to ask him to play the same song three or four times and capture different angles, but I didn’t at the time, so I had to work with what I had :)

Why would it have been better if I had the same song of the different angles? Continuity. You’ll notice when I cut away to my “b-roll” shots, his hand movements don’t exactly match, specifically when he slaps the guitar. I watched through the clips and marked where he did slap it and then tried to match it as best I could to the sound waves of when he did on the audio. Far from perfect, but ok for just messing around :)

The colour correction was really easy. Once you know what you’re doing in Final Cut, and if you expose well when you shoot, I have found S-Log2 pretty straightforward on this occasion to make it pop. So there you have it - a quick capture of my brother’s passion on a chilled afternoon.

Below I have also embedded 2 more clips. One is the same clip, but showing before and after correction and the other is a tutorial on how the CC was done.

A little thing I shot with my brother. Showing what it looked like with and without grading. You can read more about it at www.capturingpassion.com and then go to the post in the trail and error section.

A short tutorial on how I colour corrected some clips of my brother shot in S-Log2 with the Sony a7s.

A random thing happened on the way to the synagogue

A new Torah procession

A new Torah

We are staying in lovely little AirBNB apartment in Tel Aviv on our Israel leg of this trip. We got “home” on our second day here and could hear what sounded like a wedding going on somewhere in the neighbourhood. I say it sounded like a wedding because I have shot a few Jewish weddings recently and the music sounded very much like that played at those weddings.

There was also someone talking on a loudspeaker, so I guessed it may have been a rally of some sort. It had been a long day of exploring and we were both pretty tired, but once I heard a song that I really like, I decided to get off my arse and see what was going on.

I followed the sounds and discovered two trucks lit up with neon lights followed by what looked like a mobile chupah and a big crowd. Then I remembered that there was a synagogue near our place and realised that this must be a procession for a new Torah scroll.

A Torah scroll is a handwritten book of the old testament. It’s a very holy thing for Jews and it’s a huge celebration when a synagogue gets a new one. I snapped some pics with my iPhone, but this event deserved video. I had been experimenting with S-log2 on my A7s and thought this “night shoot” would be a great chance to play around.

I ran back to the apartment, grabbed the camera - thankfully my new Ziess 35mm f1.4 (beautiful lens) was ready to go - and off I went.

As much as I wanted to capture the moment, I was aware that this was not a wedding I had been hired to shoot and I didn’t want to get in people’s faces too much. This is where the APSC mode on the camera really comes in handy. I was able to have a prime lens on the camera, but effectively switch from a 35mm to a 50-ishmm when I wanted to get a bit closer without intruding.

Looking at what I got, I think I’m getting a better idea of what S-log2 does and how to best expose for it. I have my zebras at 75% and I didn’t have a ND filter on. As a result, the lowest ISO was I going to get with S-log2 was going to be 3200. It looked, from the zebras, that I was overexposing a lot. I was pleasantly surprised when I got the footage back in FCP X that, except for one or two shots of the lights on the vans, I hadn’t overexposed much of the footage at all.

As for the compositions and actual camera work, considering it was all handheld, I am pretty happy with the steadiness of it. It’s far from perfect, but acceptable. I do wish I had been a bit braver and just asked people if they minded if I filmed them and gotten a few more intimate shots. As it is, I feel that most of the clip has very similar framing.

The colour correction took me quick a while. I think I’ll have to write another entire post on that (if I can remember since I cut this two days ago and have been on the road since!).

The short version would be that I used the built in colour tools in FCP X along with Magic Bullet Mojo. Mostly I was just getting more contrast and a bit more warmth. I know that S-log2 is meant to be very flat, but I found I didn’t have to bump up the saturation nearly as much as I thought I would need to.

I suppose the colour “look” I got with Magic bullet I could have done on my own with the built in tools of FCP X, but that would have been ages of playing around and experimenting. With plug-ins like Magic Bullet, FilmConvert and Colourista, I have these pre-prepared looks and it makes my work much faster.

Still, as a spur-of-the-moment shoot and quick edit, I think what I got was fairly engaging :)

Music purchased from www.cinephonix.com