Time Lapse or Motion

[Stephen Smith]

Do you have any links to some samples of this?

Salt Lake Video

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[Cris Harshman]

Not at hand. I’ve seen a couple of commercials that do something similar – for instance, I recall a car commercial with an SUV driving at normal speed through a crowd of sped-up people. There’s a clip from Garden State (YouTube has it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNUK5sKtMeg – scrub to around 2:24) that’s close to what I want – where the person sitting on the couch in that video is (I’m assuming) just sitting still, I want that person to move in real time while the rest of the action is sped up.

If I find something else that’s a better example, I’ll post it.

Thanks for the help.

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[Mark Suszko]

The example of this that sticks in my head, and you can probably Youtube it, was a music video starring David Cassidy, formerly of The Partridge Family, just before he had his big comeback in Vegas. I think the song is called “Lying to Myself”, and has shots like this set in the waiting room of a bus or train station. Catchy tune, good hook and harmony, btw.

The cheap, bootstrap way: your actor that is to move in “normal” time actually moves super-slowly, while you let everything else in the frame move normally. You then just speed up the playback in the timeline. To get anything like a lipsynch for this requires some math to work out the relative frame rates based on the finished duration of the shot and the “speed” you want to get, as it does for real time lapse. As a guide for the actor in the field, you might make an mp3 file for his ipod that counts out the beats before each move, which should help keep the actor on time if he can hear it. Then after every x seconds the ipod gives out a beep or other cue, and he moves his foot 12 inches, etc.

Analog Slow-mo audio of the song he’s supposed to sing likely will be so slow and low-pitched he can’t really make anything out, but you *could* take a regular version of the song, use quicktime pro or an audio editing program to extend the playback and slow it while retaining the pitch, and a pre-recorded guide track of THAT might be enough to go on for the actor as a guide. It will sound like hell, though, at that slow frame rate, much like frame-by- frame audio scrubbing in an NLE timeline.

A variation of the “bootstrap” method is to shoot exactly like that but also add in a camera that has overcrank-undercrank ability, this gives you smoother slo-mo becasue you fewer in-between frames to interpolate and more real actual frames. Those cameras are generally expensive to rent, but Panasonic offers one that maybe can do it relatively cheap, I want to say the HVX-200 is the model, but don’t hold me to it.

If your shot is for example a guy walking down a sidewalk, he’s going to move about as fast in real life as the minute hand of an analog watch. You may have to contend with passers-by reacting to this slow-moving or apparently motionless person, and they may ruin the shot unless you control everybody in the shots.

The more expensive way to do this, but faster and more creatively flexible, is to use a motion-control camera rig and shoot a “plate” shot of the background and people in one pass, then a duplicate pass of just your talent in the same field of view, with no one else in shot. Then rotoscope the single-actor version to remove background and create an alpha channel, (lots of tedious painting and masking there) and now you have two tracks you can match up and apply varying temporal changes to at will. The compositor will help you lock the relative positions pretty well.

You can fake it as well by using chromakey for your “slow guy” and inserting him into the fast-moving scene later using a compositor like AfterEffects or Combustion. One might in fact have a grip or two walk alongside the actor holding a full-size green screen behind him, which reduces the amount of tedious painting out with roto later and replaces it with tedious chromakey tweaking instead:-) One other trick I can think of: shoot everything “normal”, spend hours to roto a mask for the actor, and apply a smearing blur and/or streak filter to the background layer.

One way or another, this is either a lot of work or a bit of money to pull off. Best of luck to you.

[John Fishback]

Checkout https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/time_freeze/
It will give you a lot of ideas, There are many other excellent tuts on the site.

John

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