Awesome Time Lapse

The 1982 movie Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance was a fascinating experimental film that combined slow motion and time-lapse footage with music by Phillip Glass to illustrate humanity’s impact on the world. Monkeon’s Gifaanisqatsi generates movies using a similar technique, only with random animated GIFs.

More than 70,000 bohemians, hippies, punks, and outsiders descended on Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for Burning Man 2022. Filmmaker Jesse Chandler forgot he had applied for a permit to fly a drone at the festival, but we’re glad he got a reminder, or we wouldn’t get to enjoy his amazing aerial time-lapse footage.

Filmmakers the McGloughlin Brothers created the eye-catching music video for the Bonobo track ATK. Using high-speed shutters and cameras placed in moving vehicles, they captured the vibrancy of the world through hypnotic, horizontal motion. It reminds us a bit of the video for Chemical Brothers’ Star Guitar.

Illustrator DP Truong chose Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow as the subject of a pencil drawing. After he finished the 21 cm (8.26 in) black-and-white portrait, he kept going. Only for the next drawing, he went with a smaller piece of paper. Then he repeated the task over and over until he got down to a 0.2 cm (0.07 in) image.

Pop artist Mr. Doodle turned his entire house into a canvas. Between September 2020 and September 2022, he covered virtually every surface inside and out with his black and white doodles. Along the way, he used more than 900 liters of white paint, 401 cans of black spray paint, and 286 bottles of black ink, and 2296 pen nibs.

Wonder what happens to your bags after you check them at the airport? We’ve seen how a conveyor system moves bags around but not how they get into an airplane. Baggae handler djsugue shared time-lapse video of how he works in cramped quarters to stow bags in the cargo hold of a 737. He says unloading is easier.

An olympic-sized pool doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you can just add to a stadium. But in 2012, Omaha’s CenturyLink Center (now the CHI Health Center Arena) enlisted Myrtha Pools to install a massive pool to support the U.S. Olympic Trials. This time-lapse video compresses the entire process down to less than 45 seconds.

There’s a big difference between making a single custom knife and cranking out a thousand. Maker Matt Estlea takes us through the painstaking and repetitive 12-step build process for each of his wood-handled marking knives. He put the knives up for sale on his website, but they appear to be out of stock at present.

The guys from the Beyond the Press channel take a moment away from destroying stuff to show us how something is made. Starting out with a 10-ton steel wheel, Finland’s ATA Gears used their DMG MORI CNC milling machine to gradually whittle its way around its edge to create the grooves in a massive gear.

Modelmaker Excessively Sentimental shows off the painstaking process of building a 1/48-scale diorama of a rickety old barn. The level of detail is astounding in the balsa wood model and its surroundings, from the distressing on each wood plank to the individual blades of grass and leaves. (Thanks, Orion!)

Sriram Murali of Saving the Dark takes us to the Anamalai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu, India for a look at one of the most amazing sights on Earth. As night falls, millions of fireflies illuminate the forest, blinking their bioluminescent bodies in synchrony. Murali’s instagram features some incredible long-exposures of the insects.

Artist Chris Conrad spent weeks folding this 1:1-scale human from a single uncut piece of paper. The figure has detailed scales and wings, and carries a tiny dragon in a second color. The time-lapse video shows how this incredible creation came together, starting with making the 19×19 foot sheet of paper with his friends.

Time-lapse 3D printing footage can look pretty awesome. Maker Caleb Kraft was wondering if it might be possible to add another layer of interest to models as they print, so he figured out a way to embed an animated flipbook that tells a story as the print is completed. The files are available for download on Printables.

Because of their positions at the top and bottom of the Earth, the North Pole and South Pole experience both the longest and shortest days of the year. This fascinating time-lapse animation shows how the top of our planet goes from 24 hours of sunlight a day in the summertime to complete darkness in the winter.

Porsche takes us inside of one of its factories to see how they create a bespoke 911 GT3 from their Exclusive Manufaktur division. It takes two days to build a car from start to finish, with 1500 workers touching each vehicle along the way. This particular specimen is finished in a gorgeous Gold Bronze Metallic paint.

No matter how many videos we see of the Aurora Borealis, we never get tired of watching this awe-inspiring natural phenomenon. To capture this impressive sequence, photographer Vincent Ledvina spent eight nights shooting more than 8000 photographs while staking out the skies over Fort Yukon, Alaska.

Most 3D prints we’ve seen are pretty small. But the guys at Argentina’s Trideo make the Big-T – a $40,000 industrial 3D printer that can crank out precise objects as large as 40″ x 40″ x 42.5″. Watch as it churns out a detailed model of a 39″ tall castle that tool almost 10 days to output. After that, watch it print a horse.

Giant water lilies are as aggressive as they look. They clear the way for growth by crowding out other plants with their spiky, club-like buds, then blocking light beneath the surface with their enormous leaves. This footage from BBC Earth’s The Green Planet provides an up-close look at these plants which can grow 8″ a day.

Artist DP Truong previously showed us how he uses a compass to draw black and white portraits. Now he’s taken that idea to another level by drawing and erasing six Marvel characters in the same spot on the same sheet of paper. The time-lapse footage is as magical as the drawings themselves.

Thanks to the photographic prowess and entomological expertise of Ant Lab, we’ve seen some amazing close-up footage of insects. This time, watch tropical butterflies as they emerge from their chrysalises and take flight. Then take a look at the tropical rainforest exhibit at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences.

Kaman Air Vehicles makes the K-MAX Aerial Truck, a dual-blade helicopter designed for lifting cargo, disaster response, and search-and-rescue operations. In this time-lapse clip, you’ll see how they build one of the choppers, and then how its blades spin without hitting each other. The helicopter can be flown with a pilot or unmanned.

Filmmaker Thomas Blanchard captured this series of macro time-lapse images of insects being born juxtaposed with the carnivorous plants laying in wait for unsuspecting creatures to wander into their sticky and deadly traps. According to Blanchard, all insects captured were released after filming.

In 2014, farmer Matt Radach captured time-lapse footage of a pumpkin growing from “seed to scale.” But this is no ordinary squash. This monster was birthed from a seed from a world-record-holding giant pumpkin, and by the time it was done, it weighed in at 1223 pounds. Keep your eyes peeled for a Transformers cameo.