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kottke.org posts about time lapse

Time Lapse of Ants Invading a Document Scanner

François Vautier installed an ant colony in his scanner and scanned it each week for five years. This is the resulting time lapse video.

Five years ago, I installed an ant colony inside my old scanner that allowed me to scan in high definition this ever evolving microcosm (animal, vegetable and mineral). The resulting clip is a close-up examination of how these tiny beings live in this unique ant farm. I observed how decay and corrosion slowly but surely invaded the internal organs of the scanner. Nature gradually takes hold of this completely synthetic environment.

(via ★colossal)


Koyaanisqatsi In Five Minutes

Wyatt Hodgson took Koyaanisqatsi and sped it up 1552% so you can watch the whole movie in about five minutes.

Reggio uses time lapse in the film to great effect — you notice different things at different playback speeds — and Hodgson’s clever use of the same technique reveals the overall structure of the film much more than watching it in realtime…but the emotion of the film is completely removed. (via the candler blog)


Bay of Fundy Extreme Tides Time Lapse

The Bay of Fundy in Eastern Canada has some of the world’s greatest tides…at times, high tide is 50+ feet higher than low tide. Here’s a time lapse video of those tides in action.


Comet time lapse

A short time lapse of Comet Lovejoy appearing in the pre-dawn sky over the Andes. Wait for the last sequence…it’s the best one.

Lovejoy was only discovered in Nov 2011 by an amateur astronomer. (via ★interesting)


Year-long sky time lapse

This is not your typical sky time lapse…instead of looping through 365 days in one video, each day gets its own little movie in a grid.

A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds. From these images, I created a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day. The days are arranged in chronological order. My intent was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year.

Best viewed at YouTube in full-screen HD. (via data pointed)


Amazing HD time lapse taken from the International Space Station

Perhaps you’ve seen the recent videos of the Earth at night taken from the ISS…they were a bit rough. This? This is five minutes of gorgeous HD:

You can watch it embedded here but what you’ll really want to do is head over to Vimeo so that you can watch it in fullscreen HD. (via colossal)


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)