urban arrogance in motion: a day in the life of the EDGE

HD Version

NOTE: You may want to playback and then allow the film to buffer (load) before playing through so it doesn't stutter during playback.

High Quality YouTube version

Flickr Version



Here are the results from my first time-lapse experiment with my Canon 40D Digital SLR camera. I pointed the camera out of my living room window towards the large and unwieldy EDGE building in Williamsburg. It has been topped off, but there's still a lot of construction of the building underway. Using the software that came with the camera, I ran a USB cable from the camera into my Macbook and set the camera to shoot one full resolution JPEG every 30 seconds. My tripod is cheap and shoddy and it took a few bumps during the day, mostly I'm sure from the cats playing around it and batting at imaginary insects. I then exported these JPEG's into a new project in Aperture, applied a basic contrast and color enhancement, cropped to a satisfying 1920x1080 size frame (it was definitely more than I would have liked), and uniformly applied these adjustments to the whole album. This was then exported as an image sequence of JPEG files, imported into Final Cut Pro and dropped into a time-line so each image was set to a value of 1/30 of a second. I added a soundtrack using different sound bank elements, trying to find a dark counterbalance to the daytime cityscape.

But most excitedly, this was my first foray into the world of HD video; it's a real treat to see all the detail that the camera picks up at full resolution. Of the three embedded versions I've posted, I like Flickr's the best at full-screen as the compression artifacts are a lot less noticeable. As I have a bit more time on my hands these days, hopefully I can make some more of these in the days to come...