Plainfront.com/Dan Paluska

the staten island ferry

i carry a timelapse camera with me everyday. when it is turned on, you just need to hold still for 30 seconds and the moment will be captured. i find this to be a powerful concept. one photo every 30 seconds gives you about a 2 minute video at the end of the day. (default playback rate on movies is closer to 5-10fps rather than 30fps.)

the above shot was a posed/planned. i placed it on the ground and we just milled around in that spot for 30 seconds and then moved on. you might not notice it in the context of the movie playing at full speed but it’s a nice frame. it’s from the following movie:

first let me try to summarize a few thoughts i have.
- document more with less opinion.
- more automatic and less filtered by my opinion of what is “worthwhile”
- sped up linear visual representation of how long things take is more useful than writing “5 hours” in a spreadsheet?
- one button simplicity
- in public it is a short conversation starter, sort of like having a pet.
- reflection on process and sharing
- less worry about documentation because it’s always happening anyways.
- don’t want to spend too much time on it but a minute or three each day seems worthwhile.

a little bit more about why timelapse in general:

Its pretty difficult to say it all concisely but it has definitely been a pretty amazing thing to carry this little green garden timelapse camera around for the last month or so and film my local environment. There are lots of cameras that do this type of thing. Maybe you should go get one?

If you are a consumer electronics giant, please make more of these devices!! It would be nice to have some static ones situated in collaborative public spaces as well. Doodle on that coming soon.

if you want to see more about the project, please check out the links below. i’m still collecting my thoughts. i’ll follow up with some more soon.

Some bits and pieces to view:
Photos and Videos on flickr
Videos on youtube – http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=242146565C9B7AA9

a letter from brinno and some discussion about why i place the videos in the public domain:

a few other timelapse videos scattered about on plebian design vimeo, electriclaserpeople, nice nice nice nice, and http://danpaluska.blip.tv.

see also discussion of one minute per day. this is most definitely in the same space as that project.

and one of our timelapse movies from absolut quartet taken with security spy and then post-processed(qt pro export to img sequence, reimport img sequence at 30fps) to fix playback framerate delay issue.