Thanks Mark. It's a great venue. Well worth a visit.

Glad you like the visuals popmonkey even if you weren't keen on the music.

The zooming and small camera moves are done in editing - each photo is 7.1 megapixel, so they can be cropped in a bit more on each successive frame and still have more pixels left than the size of the video frame, even at 1080p.

The larger pans are done by mounting the camera on a motorised mount normally used for telescopes. It is designed to move very slowly and smoothly so a telescope follows the stars as the earth rotates. At the speed I was running it it takes 3 hours to do one rotation.

thanks for the reply. clever to use a telescope drive for the pans.

did you write your own software/script gimp or similar to do the cropping zooms?

I used Adobe After Effects for this. Once the sequence of stills is imported in can be handled like a video file, but with the higher resolution so you can do more with it. But it could be done with gimp.

Thanks Ian. I'm pleased with the result - it was worth all the odd looks I was getting!