Dave and Jen For Oxfam

As mentioned in this week’s countdown post, Squishy is starring in his own timelapse video. As a result of the muffins Jen baked for her workmates, and my hunger for said muffins, Squishy and I hatched a plan. A very good plan. The plan consisted of pretending we needed to “trial a timelapse for the trip” with, of course, Squishy and a muffin. I will let you in on a secret: Squishy didn’t actually eat the muffin. I did. And I got crumbs on my camera. So without further ado, presenting the one and only “Squishy Eats Muffins”.

For those interested this was indeed a test of very rough timelapse animation. Using my well travelled and well liked Canon A700 in automatic mode, I simply snapped off a round of photos whilst chipping away at the muffin. The pics were dumped via Adobe Lightroom, where all my images are catalogued based on a simple file naming convention and tagging system. Next up comes Sony Vegas 8 where the Import Media function allows a series of photos to be imported as if a film strip. Setting framerate to 15fps and using velocity envelopes to tweak allows for the timelapse to be adjusted simply. The less said about the voiceover the better (+7 pitch in Sonic Foundry Soundforge 6 – no I haven’t upgraded as I prefer to avoid Sony products), and then it’s time to render. Render as 640 by 480 at 15fps and within 45 minutes from the start to the end we have our first test upped to YouTube and Vimeo.

The next test will be with the Canon Capture or gPhoto software to remotely control the image capture, which will ideally come in useful for some interesting timelapses whilst on our trip. More on that when we start to do some testing but for now, I would suggest anyone interesting in timelapses to check out the Vimeo videos of a friend of ours, Jaymis. This one is of a stencil being cut and sprayed, whilst this one is of, well, Draper Cinefold screens being repaired. No wait, don’t yawn, there are sparks. Eveyrone likes sparks. And on that note, I’ve said enough!