Time-Lapse Photography

A Year in the Life of the World - Duke and Battersby

I know we didn’t technically watch the video A Year in the Life of the World, but while looking at Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke’s website we briefly watched this project as a work in progress video proposal. I found this video to be very exciting since I have always been very interested in time-lapse photography. Last year in film, my group was doing a documentary on a McMaster run event and during one of the interview’s with a participant we decided to use time-lapse photography. We used this footage of just people passing outside the student center to show the amount of traffic as B-roll footage during the interview.

This idea of time-lapse photography is very inspiring to me, and when I saw this proposal I thought it was a really cool project. Not only did I think this was a cool movie idea, but I also really liked this type of proposal. It was very clear as to what they were going to do, and having visuals as examples of how the installations would appear made the whole idea come together nicely and clear. This gives the audience a better understanding of what Battersby and Duke are trying to propose, whereas a written proposal does not always get the same results. You may think you are clearly explaining you idea within your written proposal, but it doesn’t always come across to the audience as clear. Having a visual proposal allows the viewer to see exactly what you are trying to propose.

Within this particular video, Battersby and Duke are collecting 200 time-lapses from all around the world using different webcams. The time-lapses are showing the changes to the landscapes over the span of a year. The interesting thing about time-lapses is the amount of change that can be visually shown over a span of a couple hours and shrunken into only a matter of seconds. The viewer is forced to see things that you may have no picked up on in real time. One example is daytime shifting to night-time. Normally if the viewer were to be watching a clip, they would notice the day shifting to night-time. However, with time-lapses, the viewer notices this transformation of time automatically as if this was being highlighted for the viewer to notice.

I also found their technique of how they are going to present the final version to be innovated. They are going to have all the 200 videos being projected onto a dome, representing the earth. In order to show a new map of the earth but instead the time-lapses will be projected onto the part of the earth they are from. This idea is very inventive and different, but very cool at the same time. This video has made me think of expanding my traditional ways of thinking and in the future I hope to be able to be this creative when presenting different multimedia projects of my own.

To watch the video, go to http://www.dukeandbattersby.com/m-flvplayer.html and click on A Year in the Life of the World.