First
ideas
Animation of a man going
into space and visiting the moon and seeing if he any find any life. After a
short while of searching he finds an alien and has some fun. The equipment I would need a lot of clay and cardboard
so I can make the different sets. My
inspiration for this idea is "Wallace and Gromit - A Grand Day Out"
as they build a rocket and fly to the moon and whilst there they encounter a
robot called Cooker
This will be a time lapse of a night sky starting from
dusk and ending at dawn. Shutter speed will be left open longer than usual so
that it can gather more light. This will be very challenging as lots of stuff
could go wrong but night sky time lapses look amazing if I can make it well. I got my inspiration from
YouTube videos people have made and some of the outcomes are brilliant.
This will be a Animation of a person doing their daily tasks around the house. This could be
interesting to see as it
is such a basic idea but if
i plan it out right then it could look really nice. I would film my mum do tasks
like ironing clothes, doing the washing, cutting the grass etc.
I chose the night sky
time lapse as my animation as
I feel like it the
outcome if made good could be better than my other ideas, plus a night time
lapse is different to a normal one as you have to put a lot more effort in
rather than a normal time lapse.
Kit list
- DSLR
camera
- DSLR
shutter remote
- Tripod
I will need to find the
right location where there is no light pollution and i need to find a night
where it is not windy and not many clouds as this might ruin the footage. I
will have to do a couple of test runs so that I can find the right exposure times for the camera.
Running
times
6 minutes = 1 sec
360 / 25 = 15
1 frame every 15
seconds
30 seconds
25 frames
750 images/ frames
Tine
to have camera running
7 hours = 420mins
420 x 60 = 25,200
25,200 / 750 = 33.6
1 photo every 30 seconds
http://www.lonelyspeck.com/the-milky-way-in-los-angeles-light-pollution/
Preparation
I need to find a day
when there was hardly any clouds in the sky and the moon is hardly visible.
This is because if the moon is out it creates more light which might disrupt
the images. I plan to film at my granddads house as the is no light pollution,
this means that when i take long exposures with my camera it wont pick up any
light from near by lights. As i am filming a time lapse i need an option so
that the camera could take a picture on its own without me having to click the
shutter button, as my camera doesn't have a built in intervalometer i will buy
one which plugs into the side of the camera.
The intervalometer
as four main settings:
Delay - how long between
pushing "start" and the first photo
Long - how long the
shutter will be open for
Interval - how often the
shutter is triggered
Number - total number of
shots taken
Production
Once i got my equipment
ready i set up my equipment outside whilst it was still light, this makes it
easier to see what I'm doing and i can frame my picture to how i want it. When i
finished setting up the tripod and the camera. i had to change the camera
settings so it is suitable for a time lapse, first i turn of VR (image stabilization) and turn the focus onto manual mode, this is because if you leave
it on auto focus it might focus on something different like a tree when you
want the stars to be in focus. Another thing i had to change was the focus
ring, i looked through the view finder and focused the a tree far away in the
distance then taped the ring so it wouldn't move, the focus is not set to infinity
meaning it will be able to focus onto the stars.
I left the camera
outside for about 2 hours to let it acclimatise to the cold conditions and once
it was completely dark i went outside to do some test shots.
These where the settings
for my first test shot:
ISO - 1600
Shutter speed - 20
seconds
Aperture - 3.5
When i looked at the
image it was a little bit too light so i changed the shutter speed to 15
seconds, this was better. After fiddling around trying to get the best
settings, the images were just getting worse. I gave the lens a wipe and took
another test shot, the image was perfect which meant that the lens was misting
up as it was in the cold. Unfortunately the only solution to this problem would
mean me standing outside all night wiping the lens every half an hour. Also i
got a plastic bag and cut some holes in to and placed it over the camera just
in case it rained in the night, even though the weather forecast was clear you
can never be too carefully. I wiped the lens and started the time lapse which
meant by the time i wake up in the morning i could check the images and hope
for the best.
When i got up in the
morning i went straight outside to check the camera. The battery had died in
the early hours of the morning (i didn't expect it too last all night anyway).
After i had charged the battery a bit i put it back into the camera and had a
look at the images, they looked good but you could see that after a while the
lens mists up. Also you can tell in one of the frames i cleaned the lens as it
goes from misty to clear.
Post Production
I got all the images
from the camera (533) and put them onto the computer, this took a while as they
were all shot in RAW format so the file sizes were quite big. I opened up
premiere pro and clicked on import media, once you find where your images are
kept i needed to click on the first image, click "image sequence" and
click the last photo and it should open up all the images as a video sequence.
But i had a problem, when i tried to import the photos it was saying the video
sequence was only 5:15 seconds long. it had missed out most of the other
pictures. After a long time of trying to sort this problem out i realised that
it had stopped importing on the image where i cleaned my lens so i imported the
first lot of images and then the rest of them.
And as i had 2 image
sequences i just put them together and i then had my full time lapse. now that
i had my time lapse in place i needed some titles to introduce the clip, i
clicked on Title, New title and default still. I typed the title of my time
lapse called "The Sky at Night" and dragged it into the time line. I
did the exact same for the credits but i also added a fade in and a fade out by
command clicking the beginning and end of the title and selection default
transitions.
The last thing i needed
was music. I wanted some nice piano music in the background so i went onto Free
Music Archive and found a nice piece of music that fit well with my time lapse.
Also everything on the site is public domain which means that no one owns
copy-write so that everyone can use it. Once i downloaded it and put it into my
time line i was ready to export. I went into export and media, this gave me
loads options but all i needed to do was click on h.264 and then scroll down to
HD 1080p 23.976, gave it a sensible name and then exported it.
Outcome
I was very pleased with
the outcome of my time lapse as you can clearly see many stars and the music
went perfectly with the clip. Next time i would prefer to make a time lapse in
summer as its warmer on a night meaning the lens wont fog up and i get a clear
picture.
http://freemusicarchive.org/
