Micro Dolly or “Surfin’ with the Alligator”

I made my first attempt at a micro dolly today. I want to use it to shoot miniatures for the “Combat” video. I started with HO scale which ended up being way to small and unstable. The camera wanted to fly off the track. I took it all back to the hobby store and supersized it up to O scale. It ended up looking like this:

I have a Canon A640 that has hacked firmware. I wrote a script to control the focus and the shot interval based on code I found here. As of now, I can control the number of frames before the focus pull, and the amount of change in focus (in mm) between shots.

UNDERSTANDING TIMELAPSE

For this shoot, the camera took about 1 picture every second. I wanted it to play at 24 frames per second (the standard movie rate). The movie is around 9 seconds long so:

9 seconds * 24 fps = 216 frames

Another way to look at time lapse is to think about how long the even is that you are shooting. Let’s say you want to shoot the daylight hours of one day and you want your movie to be 30 seconds long. How may frames do you need?

30 seconds * 24 fps = 720 frames

If you are going to capture the whole day, how often should the camera shoot a frame?

12 hour * 60 minutes * 60 seconds = 43200 seconds / 720 frames = 1 frame every 60 seconds

END INTERVAL LESSON

This was a test with my still camera to see if I could have it control a shift in focus at a given interval. I sat in my yard and pushed the camera down the track and it took a picture every second. I pushed the camera REALLY SLOWLY. I stitched the frames together in After Effects at 24 fps. It worked pretty well in the first and last shots. The middle shot was a test of the interval timer.

Here is “Surfin’ with the Alligator” – 9 seconds of joy!

~3.5mb

Double click to play
[qt:/blog/movies/Alli.mov /blog/movies/Alli_poster.mov 480 320]