This New York City Time-Lapse Is a Fast Paced Example of Amazing Editing and Sound Design

"A Taste of New York," produced by Peter Jablonowski, Thomas Pöcksteiner, and Lorenz Pritz, is the third installment of their very popular time-lapse series. The team behind Film Spektakel have once again taken their enormous talents and experience with large scale time-lapses and distilled it down to a masterful three minute experience.

There is no shortage of amazing time-lapse videos being made daily and New York, like any major hub, is a bountiful source of material. However, the stylistic passion and meticulous design that has become expected from Film Spektakel goes unrivaled in this newest entry. It's the type of video that just inspires creativity. It challenges you to go further in your own work. It makes you want to go out, explore your own city, and look at it in a new way.

In September 2016 we visited this awesome city to try out some new time-lapse stuff. It took us 10 days, a lot of burgers and one helicopter ride to produce this video.

Unlike their previous “A Taste…” videos which each took multiple years to make, this only took 10 days shooting day and night (with very little sleep) to explore and capture every complex sequence. Anyone who has ever visited N.Y.C. as a tourist will know, seeing the whole city in just 10 days is not possible. I can't even imagine the amount of planning and preparation that must have to happen before landing in N.Y.C. to pull this off.

If you took each part of this video on its own it would be impressive work. The locations and still images are beautiful. Each time lapse sequence is skillfully planned out. The editing of quick cuts that make the video feel both fast paced and longer than three minutes might be the most impressive part. However the sound design, by Alex Clement, is what really brings everything together. Everyone knows the importance of sound and music in film and this is a perfect example of all the right components coming together.

The team at Film Spektakel in 10 days managed to shoot 65,000 photos for a total of 2.6 TB of HDD space and edit it down to just 3 minutes of video. According to their Vimeo page, the final video took “36 hours just to render on the best equipped iMac available.” Filming a project like this takes a lot of equipment including:

Check out the first and second film in this series "A Taste of Vienna" and "A Taste of Austria."

[via Vimeo]

Michael DeStefano's picture

Michael DeStefano is a commercial/editorial photographer focusing on Outdoor Lifestyle and Adventure. Based in Boston, MA he combines his passion for outdoor sports like climbing and surfing into his work. When not traveling or outdoors he is often found geeking out over new tech gadgets.

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4 Comments

What an incredible piece of work!

Absolutely amazing! And I kinda love that Neistat reference with the music.

Wow! I'd like to see more of these from different cities\countries around the world.