Hyperlapse and time-lapse videos generally show urban or natural landscapes but this flow motion featuring iconic predators in Botswana is very unique.
The work of New York-based photographer Tyler Fairbank offers a refreshing point of view of the African wildlife. He created the video over eight days with two complementary cameras. The Canon 1D X Mark II allowed him to shoot very fast handheld hyperlapse thanks to the 16 fps burst speed of this high-end sport camera. On the other hand, the Canon 5DS R was used to produce the extreme close up shots and the 8.6K resolution gave him a lot of room in post to digitally zoom inside the image. These cameras were coupled with a wide-angle Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 II lens, a long Tamron 150-600mm f/5-6.3 telephoto, and the ever versatile Canon 24-105mm f/4 optic.
Tyler Fairbank and his Meerkat assistant shooting with a Canon 5DS R and the Tamron 150-600 f/5-6.3 telephoto lens.
One handheld camera for the hyperlapse and one mounted on the Manfrotto super clamp for the regular time-lapse.
Fairbank explained to Fstoppers:
Most shots were captured handheld from the safari car or boat. My Manfrotto super clamp came in very handy as I was able to leave a wide time-lapse shooting while getting close up shots handheld. The only time a tripod was used was when it was safe to step off the vehicle. Many shots were captured in bursts which is where the Canon 1D X Mark II shines. It can be quite loud however when shooting dozens of shots at 16 fps, and there were a lot of instances I had to hold off shooting to not disturb the wildlife.
Overall, the photographer was able to render 300 time-lapse clips out of the 38,000 images captured during the safari. However, “there's a ton of footage that didn't make the cut and I'll be sharing some shots on my Instagram over the next few weeks,” Fairbank said. Producing this type of flow motion video is extremely time-consuming. The editing phase was very long “with heavy stabilization, lots of deflicker, rotoscoping, bird removal. LRTimelapse and Lightroom was used for every sequence and the majority of the shots have been manually stabilized frame-by-frame in After Effects in order to make the transitions possible.”
Flow motion video editing requires a lot of manual rotoscoping and masking. This is a lot of work.
Quick preview of the complexity of the audio track in Adobe Premiere Pro audio panel.
You can follow Tyler Fairbank's work on his website and Instagram account.
All images used with permission.
Very cool but too jerky at times; it hurt my eyes.
How the heck did he do it !!! Very original and creative with technique I have not seen before. I hope to see more from him in the future.
Butch
epic!!!!!
Whoa, he has a very big bag of nifty tricks. Amazing he shot all that over only 8 days. I'm tipping he needed a very big sleep after achieving all that filming in just 8 days.
And that's before we start to comprehend what the editing must have taken!
I guessing the edit took a whole lot longer than 8 days ;)
No doubt! However he did extremely well to gather all the footage he did, to enable him to edit it. Finding such a variety of wild African animals doing interesting things in good light is not like shooting fish in a barrel!
Wow! Very easy to engage. Great work.