By E.M. Kinsman

Chapter 7:  Time-Lapse photography on construction sites:  

Twice a month I get requests for quotes involving some sort of filming at a construction site.  Most of the requests go something like this:  The contractor, builder, corporate vp, or forman think it would be cool to have a timelapse they could incorporate into some sort of vague video project in the future.  They would like the project shot on film and the duration of the construction will be from four months to five years.
    All of this is to accomplished at some remote site with no phone lines and no electricity available.

    I used to spend a lot of time generating specific quotes for each project ranging from $5,000 to $90,000.  After writing a dozen or so of these quotes, I got smart and now typically respond the request by saying the project will be in the above range and a site specific quote will cost $100.00
    Needless to say this had cut down the amount of time wasted by these quotes a great deal.  The bottom line of construction projects is is there is no specific project they are not going to spend a lot of money on time-lapse work.  The majority of the folks that contact me think a month long filming project will be only a few hounded dollars.

    Insurance companies will often want to document a construction site, and these requests are very serious.  An insurance company will be interested to know that certain parts of a building were delivered and installed in a specific order, and will also like to know when the components went into place.  This type of job will never be made into a movie and is a great place to use several of the modern digital still cameras.  Several of these cameras can be programed to dump to a computer and a cellular modem can be used to download the digital images from a remote site every day or week as the project requires.

    Construction projects that do not have a large budget can use an easily programed web cam and convert the resulting images into a movie.  An even less expensive fix is for a still camera to be tripped once a day and any future project that develops can use the resulting still images with a fade between each to get the desired time-lapse effect.  So there are a lot of ways to ge the time-lapse shot with out dishing out the big bucks.

    All of the construction site projects have several aspects in common:

    A secure platform needs to be built.  The camera needs to be placed in a water proof box with a window designed to minimize reflections.
    The camera needs to be supplied with electricity, and if tied to the power grid will need an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) .  The camera / computer system will also need a phone line to monitor progress via a web cam.  The camera will also need routine maintenance - cleaning lens covers, and of course changing film.  Even though cameras like the Mitchell 16 will take a 1200 ft load, it may be desirable to change film more often if the camera is mounted in 120 degree heat.

Sleeping People - Sleep Research:

    In the old days sleep research was done with 16 mm cameras, lots of light, and the subjects usually wore blinders.  Now with the advent of video and digital time-lapse techniques sleep researchers are able to view a parents time-lapse movie in the morning.  Sleep researchers also use a bunch of neat motion detectors hooked into a computer to make plots of motion verse time.  Sleep time-lapses are quite interesting to view - hard to believe a person can move around so much in their sleep.

    When filming people sleeping it is very important for the camera to be totally quiet and the light level used to be consistent with the persons normal sleeping environment.  The above shot was taking in white light, but most current medical and research studies are taken in infrared light with video cameras.  The sleeping subject can not see the I.R. light and thus sleeps in their normal patterns

Cooking Food:

    This past year I was asked to do a project on baking food - specifically cookies.  The topic was approached in several different ways.  Time-lapse movies can easily be filmed as a cookie bakes on a hot griddle.  The bottom of the cookie gets burned quite black, but the top surface melts and looks very nice.  This first experiment turned out the be by far the easiest technique, and since I was not going to eat the cookies, who cared if the cookie was burnt on the bottom?
        There were two competing techniques developed a the same time as the griddle method: the oven , and table top toaster techniques.  An old oven has a hole cut in the door and a stepping motor is attached to a shutter.  The shutter opens just before a shot.  This technique gives excellent results, but you have to cut up an oven.  The shutter not only keeps the camera lens from getting splashed with fat, but was initially intended to keep the oven warm.  Photo lights were hard wired into the inside of the oven.  The lights did not seem to be affected by the oven , due to the 350 degrees oven temperature was probably below there normal working surface temperature.
    The last technique wa to use a table top toaster and leave the door open.  The top glowing coils were too close to the baking dough and the red thermal heating coils affected the color temperature of the shot.  It was also very hard to get the light into the baking surface at a nice angle.
    The majority of food time-lapses are now done by speeding up a digital bata cam tape on a digital editing system like the Avid.
 

Overall  Conclusions

A photographer can always say - "if only I had that new piece of equipment..." this is a great trap to fall into.  In the world of cinematography the formats are quickly changing.  The equipment does not really matter, in 30 years there will still be fantastic work done on the 16 mm format - and it will be so go the client will convert it to the most modern format.  Be careful with your composition, Be creative, push both your technical ability as well as your artistic ability, and most of all stick to it - don't give up!  Keep those cameras running!

I hope that those of you that have read this far have found some tricks or hints to help you out in your photography. As an avid time-lapse photographer I am always interested to hear ideas and tips from those in the trenches. If you have tips, contributions, or criticism drop me a note.

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