Screened at the Gasteig Cultural Museum in Munich Germany [May 23rd 2009] as part of the Lange Nacht der Musik Festival: gasteig.de

This is a movie I made for my friend Allen Tompkins of the music project Dark Matter Noise. This is actually an excerpt from a longer piece titled 'DMN'. I also used a very short snippet from another Dark Matter Noise song called 'Pulse'. You can check out both songs in their entirety on the Dark Matter Noise myspace profile: profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=155011574.

I really appreciate the emails and comments I've received these last few months. I've gotten a lot of questions on whether there are any tutorials or books I can recommend for stop-motion or time-lapse photography. I pretty much developed my workflow through trial and error, but recently I came across a great video tutorial from 'This Week In Photography' which has really helped me out (vimeo.com/3340273).

I'm not sure if this is the best way to go about doing a stop-motion or time-lapse project, but for what it's worth, here's what I did for this one...

WORKFLOW:

1) All photos were taken with the Canon 5d Mark 1 using a 50mm 1.4 lens and the 24-105mm f4 L Kit Lens.

2) Photos were imported into Lightroom 2 for color effects and correction. I cropped all the photos to an HD 16x9 ratio. I also drew titles and animations on some of the frames using the adjustment brush.

3) I then created a 'Source Photos' folder to export my photos into.

4) When exporting out of Lightroom 2 in the export menu under image sizing, I checked the box for 'Resize To Fit' and chose 'Short Edge' from the contextual menu. Next to 'Pixels' I changed the number to 1080 (for HD) and kept the resolution at 300 'pixels per inch'.

5) After exporting my pictures to my 'Source Photos' folder, I opened Quicktime Pro. From the 'File' menu, I chose 'Open Image Sequence' and then clicked on the first photo in my 'Source Photos' folder (Quicktime Pro wont let you choose all the photos in the folder- just click on the first photo, and Quicktime Pro will know to combine the rest sequentially... it will also ask you how many frames per second you want your movie to be). This was a huge time saver for me compared to the workflow I outlined under the 'Campfire' video (vimeo.com/2304783).

6) A movie of all my images appeared in the Quicktime Player and I saved this movie to a new folder called 'Source Clips'.

7) I then repeated this process until I had all my finished image sequences for my movie in my 'Source Clips' folder.

8) I opened Final Cut and imported all my image sequences from my 'Source Clips' folder... and that's it! The rest is editing.

I hope that helps!

Once again, most of this workflow is also outlined in the video tutorial that I linked to above.

americanvirus.com