...is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998 (archives). You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.
Wyatt Hodgson took Koyaanisqatsi and sped it up 1552% so you can watch the whole movie in about five minutes.
Reggio uses time lapse in the film to great effect -- you notice different things at different playback speeds -- and Hodgson's clever use of the same technique reveals the overall structure of the film much more than watching it in realtime...but the emotion of the film is completely removed. (via the candler blog)
The Bay of Fundy in Eastern Canada has some of the world's greatest tides...at times, high tide is 50+ feet higher than low tide. Here's a time lapse video of those tides in action.
A short time lapse of Comet Lovejoy appearing in the pre-dawn sky over the Andes. Wait for the last sequence...it's the best one.
Lovejoy was only discovered in Nov 2011 by an amateur astronomer. (via ★interesting)
This is not your typical sky time lapse...instead of looping through 365 days in one video, each day gets its own little movie in a grid.
A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds. From these images, I created a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day. The days are arranged in chronological order. My intent was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year.
Best viewed at YouTube in full-screen HD. (via data pointed)
Perhaps you've seen the recent videos of the Earth at night taken from the ISS...they were a bit rough. This? This is five minutes of gorgeous HD:
You can watch it embedded here but what you'll really want to do is head over to Vimeo so that you can watch it in fullscreen HD. (via colossal)
When I was a kid, one of my favorite things on one of my favorite shows (3-2-1 Contact) was Al Jarnow's Cosmic Clock, a short video animation showing a billion years of time passing in fewer than two minutes. There's so much science in this little video.
This is one of those things I thought I'd just never see again. YouTube is truly a global treasure.
Time lapse movie composed of photographs taken from the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth at night.
This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.
(via stellar)
Watch a time lapse video of an animator making a stop-motion video.
Seven-minute video of 12,000 screenshots of the front page of the NY Times website taken over a period of several months by "an errant cron task".
This is a timelapse animation of the surprisingly wobbly Moon over a period of one year.
Note: this is an animation, not a timelapse video...i.e. there's CG involved. More info here.
A ten-minute video shows clouds forming and dissipating at timelapse speed. Quite relaxing.
Best viewed in fullscreen HD.
This will be the hundredth night sky timelapse video you've seen but probably the first one that shows the Earth rotating instead of the stars.
Best viewed full screen. (via stellar)
A 20-hour span of blizzard in about 40 seconds. There are several points at which it seems the snow should stop accumulating on the table, but it never does.
Like Noah Kalina's Everyday but with a newborn baby girl aging 10 years.
(thx, matt)
Today is the day for time lapse construction videos...this one shows the demolition of a bridge in Toronto.
It takes a minute or so to get going, but after that it's like ants picking a tree branch bare. (thx, james)
Nice time lapse of a construction crew replacing some train tracks in San Francisco.
A 13-day time lapse video of food rotting.
If you want to lose weight, I'd suggest the time lapse maggots diet where you watch this video everytime you feel hungry. (via devour)
Metafilter feeds our needs for time-lapse photography and nutrition by linking to a full plate of time-lapse vegetation growth. Beans may be good for the heart, but pepper plants know how to shake it.
Fun timelapse video of a day in the life of the Abbey Road crosswalk depicted on The Beatles album of the same name. (via buzzfeed)
Excellent timelapse video of a baby playing with his toys. The camera angle and the way he moves through the room consuming his toys makes it look like an amoeba in a petri dish. (thx, curtis)
Timelapse video of a cross country flight at night, flying above clouds glowing with city lights.
My advice to you is to make the video full screen, put in your headphones and enjoy the soothing ride. (via migurski)
Google is soliciting contributions to Google Maps with their Map Maker service.
With Google Map Maker, you can become a citizen cartographer and help improve the quality of maps and local information in your region. You are invited to map the world with us!
They've posted several videos to YouTube that show timelapsed edits to maps; here's Islamabad, Pakistan coming into existence. (via o'reilly radar)
Update: Several people wrote in to recommend OpenStreetMap instead because Google doesn't make the data available in a raw form whereas the OSM data is under a CC license available for derivative works like OpenCycleMap. (thx, mike and everyone)
Dan Hanna has made a rotating self-portrait video assembled from 17 years of daily photos, a la Noah Kalina's Everyday video.
17 years worth of taking 2 photos a day as my head rotates in sync with the Earth around the Sun.
The split screen is a nice touch and I love watching the hair on his shaved head grow back like a Chia Pet every few months. Here's a description of the rig he uses to take the photos. (via heading east)
This year's harvest of crop art from the Minnesota State Fair included Grand Theft Festal, a mashup of Grand Theft Auto and Festal-brand canned corn done in millet, alfalfa, canola, and white clover seeds. The artist recorded a timelapse video of its construction. (via mark simonson)
This is my favorite scene from Koyaanisqatsi.
Unaware at first of the camera, she sees it. Then smiles almost imperceptibly and turns away. Then self-consciously looks everywhere but at the camera. And finally, a last contemptous peek at the camera.
Update: Sorry, the video is not available outside of the US.
Time lapse video of a designer laying out an article for a magazine. I could watch stuff like this all day. It's also the type of video I wish were on Vimeo...sometimes YouTube is like watching a UHF station from 200 miles away with the rabbit ears positioned just so. (via quips)
Video of a Processing program that slices up frames from a video and displays them with a slight time delay from top to bottom. The result is completely trippy. Wait for the door opening bit. See also: time merge media. (via today and tomorrow...thx, red)
Wonderful timelapse photos by Alexey Titarenko of "shadow" people in St. Petersburg just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This one is stunning. (via heading east)
Time lapse of a gorgeous Chad Pugh illustration from start to finish (in HD).
The video is a condensed time lapse of screenshots over a several month period. Total physical drawing time is close to 40 hours and I'd add an equal amount of time for concept time and readying the print. A screenshot was taken every 5 seconds, which actually results in a full 18 minute video.
This illustration inspired Vimeo's wonderful login screen. A limited-edition print of the finished illustration is available. (via jakob)
This timelapse video of man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours is difficult to watch. The video accompanies an article in the New Yorker about elevators.
White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice-it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)
The end of White's story is heartbreaking. On the plus side, the article also discusses a favorite social phenomenon of mine, how strangers space themselves in elevators.
If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the "touch zone"; seven square feet as the "no-touch zone"; and ten square feet as the "personal-comfort zone." Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range -- less than eighteen inches between people -- "intimate distance," the point at which you can sense another person's odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, "Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons."
(via waxy)
A collection of time-lapse movies of people playing Wii. One fellow plays for quite some time while holding a newborn baby.
Someone made a video overlay of the 134 times it took him to get through one level of hacked version of Mario World.
Oh, and how that relates to quantum mechanics:
But, we can kind of think of the multi-playthrough Kaizo Mario World video as a silly, sci-fi style demonstration of the Quantum Suicide experiment. At each moment of the playthrough there's a lot of different things Mario could have done, and almost all of them lead to horrible death. The anthropic principle, in the form of the emulator's save/restore feature, postselects for the possibilities where Mario actually survives and ensures that although a lot of possible paths have to get discarded, the camera remains fixed on the one path where after one minute and fifty-six seconds some observer still exists.
Some of my favorite art and media deals with the display of multiple time periods at once. Here are some other examples, many of which I've featured on kottke.org in the past.
Averaging Gradius predates the Mario World video by a couple years; it's 15 games of Gradius layered over one another.
I found even the more pointless things incredibly interesting (and telling), like seeing when each person pressed the start button to skip the title screen from scrolling in, or watching as each Vic Viper, in sequence, would take out the red ships flying in a wave pattern, to leave behind power-ups in an almost perfect sine wave sequence. I love how the little mech-like gunpods together emerge from off screen, as a bright, white mass, and slowly break apart into a rainbow of mech clones.
According to the start screen, Cursor*10 invites the you to "cooperate by oneself". The game applies the lessons of Averaging Gradius and multiple-playthrough Kaizo Mario World to create a playable game. The first time through, you're on your own. On subsequent plays, the game overlays your previous attempts on the screen to help you avoid mistakes, get through faster, and collaborate on the tougher puzzles.
Moving away from games, several artists are experimenting with the compression of multiple photographs made over time into one view. Jason Salavon's averaged Playboy centerfolds and other amalgamations, Atta Kim's long exposures, Michael Wesley's Open Shutter Projekt and others. I'm quite sure there are many more.
Dozens of frames of Run Lola Run racing across the giant video screen in the lobby of the IAC building.
The same kind of thing happens in this Call and Response video; 9 frames display at the same time (with audio), each a moment ahead of the previous frame.
Related, but not exactly in the same spirit, are projects like Noah Kalina's Noah K. Everyday in which several photos of the same person (or persons) taken over time are displayed on one page, like frames of a very slow moving film. More examples: JK Keller's The Adaption to my Generation, Nicholas Nixon's portraits of the Brown sisters, John Stone's fitness progress, Diego Golberg's 32 years of family portraits, and many more.
Update: Another video game one: 1000 cars racing at the same time. (thx, matt)
Update: More games: Super Earth Defense Game, Time Raider, and Timebot. (thx, jon)
Update: Recreating Movement is a method for making time merge photos (thx, boris):
With the help of various filters and settings Recreating Movement makes it possible to extract single frames of any given film sequence and arranges them behind each other in a three-dimensional space. This creates a tube-like set of frames that "freezes" a particular time span in a film.
How You See It overlays three TV news programs covering the same story. (via waxy)
Update: James Seo's White Glove Tracking visualizations. The Slinky one is mesmerizing once you figure out what to look for. Seo also keeps a blog on spilt-screen media.
Several very cool animations, graphs, and photos of Northern Hemisphere sea ice coverage are available from The Cryosphere Today. Among them: ice coverage time-lapse from 1978-2006 and 2007's ice retreat (the greatest ever recorded). (via ben saunders)
Timelapse animated map of the NYC subway that shows the order of the subway lines being built. See also the history of the NYC subway, photos of the IRT's first stations, and if you really don't have anything else to do for the next hour or so, an extensive trove of historical NYC subway maps.
Timelapse animation of the moon going through a full lunar cycle. Wobble wobble wobble wobble. More info here.
Timelapse video of a map showing Civil War battles and movements...four years of war in four minutes. The video was produced by Harvest Moon Studio for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
Ten minute clip from the movie Baraka. From Wikipedia: "Often compared to Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka's subject matter has some similarities -- including footage of various landscapes, churches, ruins, religious ceremonies, and cities thrumming with life, filmed using time-lapse photography in order to capture the great pulse of humanity as it flocks and swarms in daily activity." (via long now)
Timelapse of a boat going through the Panama Canal. How the boat moves reminds me of Doom or Quake. This couple's vacation write-up includes a trip through the canal. "The never to be forgotten trip lasted ten hours and cost Princess Cruise Lines more than $150,000 in tolls."
Time lapse video of someone painting the Mona Lisa in MS Paint.
Time-lapse video of Picasso making a painting, from start to finish. Tinselman has more info on the video.
Time lapse videos from Vimeo, which relaunched nicely today.
The best way to get a sense of what kottke.org is all about is to head to the front page or check out some random entries from the archives.
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