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kottke.org posts about time lapse

A billion years in the blink of an eye

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things on one of my favorite shows (3-2-1 Contact) was Al Jarnow’s Cosmic Clock, a short video animation showing a billion years of time passing in fewer than two minutes. There’s so much science in this little video.

This is one of those things I thought I’d just never see again. YouTube is truly a global treasure.


Earth orbit time lapse

Time lapse movie composed of photographs taken from the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth at night.

This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.

(via stellar)


Time lapse squared

Watch a time lapse video of an animator making a stop-motion video.

Inception horn!


nytimes.com front page time lapse

Seven-minute video of 12,000 screenshots of the front page of the NY Times website taken over a period of several months by “an errant cron task”.

More info here.


Year-long Moon timelapse

This is a timelapse animation of the surprisingly wobbly Moon over a period of one year.

Note: this is an animation, not a timelapse video…i.e. there’s CG involved. More info here.


Timelapse clouds

A ten-minute video shows clouds forming and dissipating at timelapse speed. Quite relaxing.

Best viewed in fullscreen HD.


Night sky timelapse…with a twist!

This will be the hundredth night sky timelapse video you’ve seen but probably the first one that shows the Earth rotating instead of the stars.

Best viewed full screen. (via stellar)


Blizzard timelapse

A 20-hour span of blizzard in about 40 seconds. There are several points at which it seems the snow should stop accumulating on the table, but it never does.


Zero to ten years timelapse

Like Noah Kalina’s Everyday but with a newborn baby girl aging 10 years.

(thx, matt)


Bridge demolition

Today is the day for time lapse construction videos…this one shows the demolition of a bridge in Toronto.

It takes a minute or so to get going, but after that it’s like ants picking a tree branch bare. (thx, james)


A crack in the track

Nice time lapse of a construction crew replacing some train tracks in San Francisco.


Rotting food time lapse

A 13-day time lapse video of food rotting.

If you want to lose weight, I’d suggest the time lapse maggots diet where you watch this video everytime you feel hungry. (via devour)


NYC taxi flow infoviz

Nice timelapse map view of taxi traffic across Manhattan.

Taxi flow NYC

I’ve often wondered what an NYC version of Stamen’s Cabspotting project would look like.


Quick soil

Metafilter feeds our needs for time-lapse photography and nutrition by linking to a full plate of time-lapse vegetation growth. Beans may be good for the heart, but pepper plants know how to shake it.


Abbey Road cliche on repeat

Fun timelapse video of a day in the life of the Abbey Road crosswalk depicted on The Beatles album of the same name. (via buzzfeed)


Four hours of baby play packed into two minutes

Excellent timelapse video of a baby playing with his toys. The camera angle and the way he moves through the room consuming his toys makes it look like an amoeba in a petri dish. (thx, curtis)


Flying over glowing cities

Timelapse video of a cross country flight at night, flying above clouds glowing with city lights.

My advice to you is to make the video full screen, put in your headphones and enjoy the soothing ride. (via migurski)


Citizen cartographers, unite!

Google is soliciting contributions to Google Maps with their Map Maker service.

With Google Map Maker, you can become a citizen cartographer and help improve the quality of maps and local information in your region. You are invited to map the world with us!

They’ve posted several videos to YouTube that show timelapsed edits to maps; here’s Islamabad, Pakistan coming into existence. (via o’reilly radar)

Update: Several people wrote in to recommend OpenStreetMap instead because Google doesn’t make the data available in a raw form whereas the OSM data is under a CC license available for derivative works like OpenCycleMap. (thx, mike and everyone)


17 years of daily self-portraits

Dan Hanna has made a rotating self-portrait video assembled from 17 years of daily photos, a la Noah Kalina’s Everyday video.

17 years worth of taking 2 photos a day as my head rotates in sync with the Earth around the Sun.

The split screen is a nice touch and I love watching the hair on his shaved head grow back like a Chia Pet every few months. Here’s a description of the rig he uses to take the photos. (via heading east)


Grand Theft Festal

This year’s harvest of crop art from the Minnesota State Fair included Grand Theft Festal, a mashup of Grand Theft Auto and Festal-brand canned corn done in millet, alfalfa, canola, and white clover seeds. The artist recorded a timelapse video of its construction. (via mark simonson)


Koyaanisqatsi

This is my favorite scene from Koyaanisqatsi.

Unaware at first of the camera, she sees it. Then smiles almost imperceptibly and turns away. Then self-consciously looks everywhere but at the camera. And finally, a last contemptous peek at the camera.

Update: Sorry, the video is not available outside of the US.


Chronos


Page layout video

Time lapse video of a designer laying out an article for a magazine. I could watch stuff like this all day. It’s also the type of video I wish were on Vimeo…sometimes YouTube is like watching a UHF station from 200 miles away with the rabbit ears positioned just so. (via quips)


Chronotopic Anamorphosis

Video of a Processing program that slices up frames from a video and displays them with a slight time delay from top to bottom. The result is completely trippy. Wait for the door opening bit. See also: time merge media. (via today and tomorrow…thx, red)


Alexey Titarenko

Wonderful timelapse photos by Alexey Titarenko of “shadow” people in St. Petersburg just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This one is stunning. (via heading east)


Time lapse of a gorgeous Chad Pugh

Time lapse of a gorgeous Chad Pugh illustration from start to finish (in HD).

The video is a condensed time lapse of screenshots over a several month period. Total physical drawing time is close to 40 hours and I’d add an equal amount of time for concept time and readying the print. A screenshot was taken every 5 seconds, which actually results in a full 18 minute video.

This illustration inspired Vimeo’s wonderful login screen. A limited-edition print of the finished illustration is available. (via jakob)


This timelapse video of man trapped in

This timelapse video of man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours is difficult to watch. The video accompanies an article in the New Yorker about elevators.

White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice-it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

The end of White’s story is heartbreaking. On the plus side, the article also discusses a favorite social phenomenon of mine, how strangers space themselves in elevators.

If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the “touch zone”; seven square feet as the “no-touch zone”; and ten square feet as the “personal-comfort zone.” Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range โ€” less than eighteen inches between people โ€” “intimate distance,” the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, “Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.”

(via waxy)


A collection of time-lapse movies of people

A collection of time-lapse movies of people playing Wii. One fellow plays for quite some time while holding a newborn baby.


Time merge media

Someone made a video overlay of the 134 times it took him to get through one level of hacked version of Mario World. (Note: the original video was taken down so the embed is a similar video.)

Oh, and how that relates to quantum mechanics:

But, we can kind of think of the multi-playthrough Kaizo Mario World video as a silly, sci-fi style demonstration of the Quantum Suicide experiment. At each moment of the playthrough there’s a lot of different things Mario could have done, and almost all of them lead to horrible death. The anthropic principle, in the form of the emulator’s save/restore feature, postselects for the possibilities where Mario actually survives and ensures that although a lot of possible paths have to get discarded, the camera remains fixed on the one path where after one minute and fifty-six seconds some observer still exists.

Some of my favorite art and media deals with the display of multiple time periods at once. Here are some other examples, many of which I’ve featured on kottke.org in the past.

Averaging Gradius predates the Mario World video by a couple years; it’s 15 games of Gradius layered over one another.

Averaging Gradius

I found even the more pointless things incredibly interesting (and telling), like seeing when each person pressed the start button to skip the title screen from scrolling in, or watching as each Vic Viper, in sequence, would take out the red ships flying in a wave pattern, to leave behind power-ups in an almost perfect sine wave sequence. I love how the little mech-like gunpods together emerge from off screen, as a bright, white mass, and slowly break apart into a rainbow of mech clones.

According to the start screen, Cursor*10 invites the you to “cooperate by oneself”. The game applies the lessons of Averaging Gradius and multiple-playthrough Kaizo Mario World to create a playable game. The first time through, you’re on your own. On subsequent plays, the game overlays your previous attempts on the screen to help you avoid mistakes, get through faster, and collaborate on the tougher puzzles.

Moving away from games, several artists are experimenting with the compression of multiple photographs made over time into one view. Jason Salavon’s averaged Playboy centerfolds and other amalgamations, Atta Kim’s long exposures, Michael Wesley’s Open Shutter Projekt and others. I’m quite sure there are many more.

Dozens of frames of Run Lola Run racing across the giant video screen in the lobby of the IAC building.

The same kind of thing happens in this Call and Response video; 9 frames display at the same time (with audio), each a moment ahead of the previous frame.

Related, but not exactly in the same spirit, are projects like Noah Kalina’s Noah K. Everyday in which several photos of the same person (or persons) taken over time are displayed on one page, like frames of a very slow moving film. More examples: JK Keller’s The Adaption to my Generation, Nicholas Nixon’s portraits of the Brown sisters, John Stone’s fitness progress, Diego Golberg’s 32 years of family portraits, and many more.

Update: Another video game one: 1000 cars racing at the same time. (thx, matt)

Update: More games: Super Earth Defense Game, Time Raider, and Timebot. (thx, jon)

Update: Recreating Movement is a method for making time merge photos (thx, boris):

With the help of various filters and settings Recreating Movement makes it possible to extract single frames of any given film sequence and arranges them behind each other in a three-dimensional space. This creates a tube-like set of frames that “freezes” a particular time span in a film.

How You See It overlays three TV news programs covering the same story. (via waxy)

Update: James Seo’s White Glove Tracking visualizations. The Slinky one is mesmerizing once you figure out what to look for. Seo also keeps a blog on spilt-screen media.


Several very cool animations, graphs, and photos

Several very cool animations, graphs, and photos of Northern Hemisphere sea ice coverage are available from The Cryosphere Today. Among them: ice coverage time-lapse from 1978-2006 and 2007’s ice retreat (the greatest ever recorded). (via ben saunders)