I went for a bike ride and a time lapse broke out.
The Photo Department was recently approached about photographing the route of this weekend’s Memorial Marathon. The idea was an interactive map featuring a time-lapse video of the route that runners will take through the city. If you think this sounds easy, then you’re doing it wrong.
Photographers Nate Billings and Sarah Phipps did the bulk of the work. All I did was ride my bicycle at Lake Hefner. They spent most of a Sunday morning with designer Matt Clayton rigging a camera to the dash of a car, programming a pocket wizard to fire a frame from the camera every second, and then driving the route. Nate says that figuring out how to attach the camera to his CRV and testing to determine the best frame rate and shutter speed took longer than the hour-and-a-half it took to drive the route. Sarah put all of the thousands of frames together to make a video that showed the entire route in about three-and-a-half minutes. Brian Mays then took the video and matched the frames with a map of the course to show where the shots take place.
If you watch the finished product, you’ll see that near the Capitol, the route goes the wrong way down a one-way street. Sarah and Nate managed to out-think that obstacle without breaking any laws. They drove that portion of the marathon with the camera attached to the back of the car shooting backwards and then later spliced that section into the time lapse with the order of those frames being reversed. So, when you play it back, it just looks like you’re going the wrong way down the street.
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