The Art of the Hyperlapse
Rule One: Have the right gear
When becoming a master at the art of Hyperlapse sakes, the first thing to know is that you're gonna have to learn by failing to some extent. For me, my early failures came from a lack of proper equipment, and also an overuse of equipment.
Use a monopod
My go to kit for hyper lapsing is first of all a monopod rather than a tripod because a monopod allows you to measure the distance of a single base point, which is important when creating and a sense of speed for your Hyperlapse.
Have a balance Bubble
Another important tool is a bubble that shows you whether your shot is tilting to the left or to the right. Now, of course you can stabilize your shot and post to avoid wonky tilting between each and every frame, but it also helps a lot to have a bubble horizon line tool to show you whether you're tilting too far to the left or the right it's important to know that it doesn't really matter if you're tilting up down or left right but more this is the rotation of the camera.
Have a grid on screen
The most important part of any hype laps is being able to see what you're shooting with a grid overlaid on top of your monitor. This grid can show you the center point of your shot which often most hyper lapses are designed by simply pointing this centerpoint at an object and making sure that the centerpoint remains on that object, no matter where the camera moves.
To do more advanced hyperlapse shots it's also possible to have your focal point move along the grid. This can happen when you get a little bit too close or too far from your shot and you need to keep a decent frame well also making sure that you don't be too far off of your focal point. This might sound confusing, but I think when you start shooting hyper lapses yourself you'll realize that you might want to change the centerpoint in which you are aiming at while moving your camera, but when changing the centerpoint, you have to make sure that you're still following your new centerpoint so having it move along a grid line is essential.
High contrast center points
When doing any hyper laps you have to pick up pick a point to aim at this can easily be the center of a Clocktower or something of the sort but if it's a far distance, it's important that there's a sense of contrast so that you don't lose your point. This contrast can come in the form of light against the dark background or dark against the light background, but also the contrast can come in the form of contrasting lines in which perhaps your centerpoint is the intersection of a horizontal line and a vertical line.
Adjusting your lighting
Now let's say you're doing a time lapse that takes place during magic hour in which the environment is getting brighter or darker. When this happens, it's important to just your ISO and F stop accordingly without changing your shutter speed. If you can help it. The reason why you don't want to change your shutter speed is because then you'll get more or less blur.
Pay for good post software
Anyone who's serious in the game about anything related to time lapses probably has paid for the right software. This is software that analyzes the meta-data between the brightness of each shot and then adjust the meta-data in between each site so that there's a seamless color exposure throughout the entirety of the shot.
To understand this deeper, you can look at this YouTube video and make sure that you do your best to apply the technique. This technique requires a back-and-forth between Lightroom and a conversion to DNG files, which is pretty complex but trust me, learning the workflow well up level, your time lapses tremendously and set you apart as an actual professional.
Freestyle As needed
Once you get the hang of hyper lapsing, you start to drive the camera as if you're driving a car in which you no longer need to really think about when to hit the gas and when to hit the break and when to make your turns because the art of hyper lapsing has become a part of you. What I mean by this is that you no longer need to measure on the ground the distance between each shot that you wanna move the camera because you have a sense for it whether it's half of a step or a giant leap. Once you get the hang of this technique, you can then start changing speed in the middle of a hyper lapse for example having smaller baby steps when shooting something that is very exciting and dynamic, but then taking a lot longer steps when shooting something that is very boring.. You can see an example of this in the following video in which I was shooting a hyper lapse while traveling under a building entrance and across a massive field to a statue very far away. The most interesting story in the shot is the entrance in the beginning and the statue in the end, but the field, which was empty was extremely boring to see so what I ended up doing is taking baby steps in the beginning in the end, but entire strides of my legs in the middle during the boring part. Alternatively, you could speed ramp in post production, but also once you get the hang of it, it's better to do it during the shoot because nobody wants to cross an entire field, taking baby steps of 6 inches at a time and then speed ramping that in post to make it faster.
Add sound effects in your edit
The final trick that I think a lot of people might overlook is sound effects when viewing any kind of time lapse or hyper lapse specifically for me. There's only two sound effects that you need and I think the second one would surprise you.
The first sound effect that you need is a whoosh, now you can't get no ordinary wish because most wishes are too fast so you might have to find almost the sound of a jet washing over you if your shot is more slow. Also, you can slow down the sound of a normal wish to make it more slow.
The second sound effect that I use for nearly every time lapse and Hyperlapse because the Hyperlapse is pretty much a time-lapse anyway is the sound of a conveyor belt ticking. You can imagine this sound which is a bunch of fast ticks of what sounds like gears moving in succession. Another similar sound might be the sound of a bike peddling backwards in which you hear the same similar ticking noises. Depending on the sound you have and your edit you may want to speed up or slow down this sound, but I find that it matches the essence of Time passing very well when watching a time-lapse or hyper-lapse.
