This film is brilliant. It has a certain spirit to it, and it’s really inspiring to see it executed so well.

This timelapse is about a year in the making. I started sometime in June of 2010 and finished it on August 19, 2011. It wasn’t constant work of course, just working on it every now and then. I’d estimate I have invested anywhere between 250 and 300 hours on it. Most of this was time I spent walking, biking, or riding the bus to locations I was shooting. There are very few locations I used a car to get to. Total frame count is about 28,000 frames and 85 different shots. All the frames weren’t used in the final product as I edited down the clips. You will notice that some of the shots were shaky. San Francisco is a very windy city and even my heavy tripod couldn’t remain still. In hindsight I should have bought a different head. All photos were shot in JPEG and then some light editing in Lightroom. Compiled into .mov clips in Quicktime Pro and then all brought together in Final Cut Pro.

I started this project because there are so many people photographing the city that I wanted to capture it in a different way that most were not. Between the time I started and the time I finished, timelapses have become huge. It’s amazing to see what fellow artists can make with even the most basic equipment.

This is the link to the video on Vimeo, and you can watch it right here:

I found myself slightly bored after work today. To kill some time, I made a cut-up loop.

Random segments of tape

I do this sometimes for fun, sometimes to create something interesting. This time, I took a recording from NPR and used it as source material. Here’s the loop all spliced together, shot with my crappy digital camera:

See that thing on the mic stand? I’ll write about that later. Anyway. If you’re familiar with Steve Reich then you might know something about “Phasing”. From the Wikipedia article on Phasing:

… The same part (a repetitive phrase) is played on two musical instruments, in steady but not identical tempo. Thus, the two instruments gradually shift out of unison, creating first a slight echo as one instrument plays a little behind the other, then a doubling with each note heard twice, then a complex ringing effect, and eventually coming back through doubling and echo into unison.

In the following sound clip, I took the most obvious example of this concept, and looped the particular passage:

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I took this even further, and doubled up the tracks until I hit four stereo pairs. I mixed that down to two tracks, and then recorded them onto my 1/4″ four-track machine. I repeated this once more, and ended up with a recording of 16 stereo pairs of the initial recording. It’s chaotic and it sounds… interesting, maybe? After a while I thought it sounded absolutely irritating.

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This experiment yielded nothing valuable. Here’s one, though, that I liked. I put this together in November last year.

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My ears are fatigued now, so I’m going to kill this boredom with Chinese delivery and Netflix.