One (1) Year in 120 seconds video

In 2008, Eirik Solheim of Oslo, Norway, filmed his backyard regularly for a year and compiled the results into a 40-second time-lapse video. In 2009, he did the same thing in a 120-second video. But this time, the video and audio quality are superior and the transitions smoother. You can read a post by Solheim on the technical details at the link.

The story

All through 2008 I snapped still images from the same spot on my balcony to make a sort of time lapse video showing one year passing by. The video was hugely successful and has close to two million views on YouTube in addition to about one million on Vimeo and hundreds of thousands of views and downloads from other web sites.

Last year I bought a new camera. The Canon 5D Mark II. In addition to excellent quality stills you can also shoot HD video with that camera. So I decided to do the same thing all over again. But this time I recorded 30 second video clips each time. My idea was that it would be possible to dissolve between the videos to get the same kind of time lapse effect, but this time with motion all the way. Snow falling, wind blowing etc.

2009 is over and I have now put all the clips I recorded through the year into a couple of videos.

I recorded clips with a 15mm fisheye, a 24mm wide angle and a 50mm lens. I’ve made three different versions. The first one is the one at the top of this article. Shot with the 15mm fisheye and “defished” using Fisheye Hemi in Photoshop. To do that I exported the video as an image sequence and did a batch job in Photoshop to run the fisheye hemi filter and some cropping.

The 50mm gives a closer look at the trees and I decided to make a longer video that gives a better view of how nature evolves with that footage. I ended up with 120 seconds.

Download the full quality versions through BitTorrent:

I’ll publish all the videos in full quality as soon as they have finished encoding. Check back here in a day or two and the text below will turn into links to the torrent files…

24 mm – One Year in 60 seconds (1920×1080 30P)
50 mm – One Year in 120 seconds (1920×1080 30P)
15 mm – One Year in 90 seconds (1280×720 30P)

How To-video (english) (1920×1080 30P)
How To-video (norwegian) (1920×1080 30P)

How did you do it?

The way I did it is actually quite simple. I found a spot on my balcony where I could place the camera in the exact same spot each time. Then I recorded video clips at irregular intervals. More or less once a week all thorugh 2009. More often during spring and autumn and not that often during summer and winter. All the videos are then put together using lots of dissolves.

It’s easier to explain the process in a video, so here it is:

The audio

The sound was simply recorded with the Canon 5D Mark II as well. And left as it was recorded on all the clips in the video.

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