We've been working with RiE-Store now for a few months, photographing their restoration projects for social media purposes (check out their Facebook page for some of the photographs) and helping them raise their profile worldwide. It's been a fun and incredibly interesting process. To mix things up a little we discussed with them the opportunity of documenting a project from beginning to end in some kind of time-lapse process. They were keen, even if some of them didn't really understand the concept.
So we waited for the right project as some of the restorations can take up to 6 months, others longer depending on the availability of the parts. Finally the right project became available; a 1942 Harley Davidson WLC, a popular motorbike used by the Canadian army in WW2 and sister of the mass produced WLA. Parts for these bikes are easy to come by and we were told that the full restoration would take about 4 weeks.
And so it began - check it out below...
It was our first time-lapse project and we learnt a lot from it. Firstly we had to purchase the correct software and learn how to use it before starting to capture the images with a one-chance-single-take opportunity (after all you can't ask these guys to put the bike back together because you've made a mistake!). The video is made up of literally thousands of images, all captured in RAW format over goodness knows how many gigabytes of data. Computers were working day and night, sometimes crashing and sometimes not producing the desired result. Fortunately as we were working with RAW we could start over until we were happy. A few grey hairs later and the sections were completed.
Next we had the task of putting the sections together. This meant purchasing further software and learning how to use it before importing the sections, creating transitions and adding titles and logos. It sounds simple but believe me, it wasn't!
Finally to make the video come to life we wrote the music, concentrating on matching the pace of the process with the music. Still, with a 9:42 min video it took considerably longer than anticipated.
With the project finished we presented it to our client, much to their absolute delight and uploaded it to YouTube. So far it has had over 800 views in about 2 weeks and some positive feedback. So what do you think? We're looking into trying Panolapse on our next project but would be interested to get some feedback from our first project.
