As part of my work with Modo this year, I set up my camera at the end of where the catwalk would be going up to capture a timelapse movie of the stage being constructed. The video was shot in a couple of batches (not my idea) over a couple of hours, with one frame every 30 seconds, compiled and inserted into the presentation at the beginning of the show as way of introduction.

Modo Fashion Show from Josh Blacker on Vimeo.

This was my first-ever attempt, and my tools were not that brilliant. I used Canon’s EOS Utility for the timed shooting, of course, saving directly in medium jpegs to my laptop, but the tripod I borrowed wasn’t the most stable and I only have iMovie ’08 to edit it. This presented two problems:

1. I left the crew to get on with it for several hours while I did other much more interesting things than sit around watching my camera watching people. Despite the ring of chairs around the tripod and myriad signs warning people of impending doom should they touch anything, someone did knock into it. Since the tripod wasn’t great, you can clearly see this in the video.
2. iMovie ’08 is rubbish. This is why the movie lasts so long – there’s a minimum (0.25 I think) number of seconds photos must stay up for, and no way to speed up clips (so re-importing a .mov and speeding up isn’t an option). On the second night, someone helpfully sped it up for me, but I don’t currently have this file and don’t remember who it was! I could, of course, have spent forever deleting frames from the sequence, but I just didn’t have the time.

The two main batches of photos each last about two hours. At the end is a very ugly jump to another small batch, at the suggestion of one of the people in charge. Of course, this was some time after I thought I’d finished shooting, so not only had all the seating been put out, but I’d packed the camera away, which explains the hideous jump – I just couldn’t get the same shot recomposed perfectly with 30mins left to shoot, edit and export the movie.