The Making of: Limitless - A 2015 Hong Kong Timelapse Film

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Hello! Welcome to The Making of Limitless. I'll walk you through my thought process and how I created Limitless. If you haven't had the chance to watch the timelapse film you can check it out down below.

Concept

Back in 2015, I watched many different timelapse films of different places around the world such as Norway, Iceland and New Zealand on Youtube and Vimeo. From watching these films, I was inspired to creating my own timelapse film of Hong Kong in the two weeks I stayed there. For my timelapse film, I wanted to create a day to night timelapse to showcase different places in Hong Kong. There were many popular places such as Victoria Harbour, Victoria Peak and Tian Tan Buddha that I knew needed to be in the film. The initial plan was to use motion control like the Alpine Labs Radian 2 or the Syrp Genie Mini but my Radian 2 never arrived in time for the trip. I ended up capturing static sequences and added some motion in post production.

In terms of music for the film, I already decided on using The Eden Project's song called Limitless. I've been a long time fan of TEP (now known as EDEN) and this instrumental piece had a cinematic quality with a very calming pace which was perfect for the timelapse I had in mind.

Gear

For the first few days of the trip most sequences were primarily shot on the old Nikon D7000. It was after shooting the night timelapse on Victoria Peak that upgrading to the Nikon D750 was needed. For the rest of the trip, timelapse sequences were shot with both cameras at each location. It significantly improved the efficiency of the workflow by allowing different angles and perspectives to be captured at the same time. Also, it provided more options in post production.

Gear List:

  • Nikon D7000
  • Nikon D750
  • Nikon 16 - 35mm
  • Nikon 50mm
  • Nikon 55 - 300mm
  • Nikon 105mm
  • Tamron 10 - 24mm

Locations

These are the locations that made it into the final timelapse film:

  • Causeway Bay
  • Central
  • Chun Tin Street
  • Fa Yuen Street
  • Hong Kong Park
  • IFC
  • Mong Kok
  • Sai Kung
  • Sai Wan Ho
  • Sharp Island
  • Sky 100
  • Tian Tan Buddha
  • Victoria Harbour
  • Victoria Peak
Braemar Hill

Braemar Hill

Locations that did not make the final cut:

 

  • Braemar HIll
  • Wu Kai Sha

 

 

 

Shooting

The shooting phase of this project was very straight forward. Travel to the location, point the camera at something interesting and let the camera do its magic. The initial goal for the night time Peak shot was to capture a sunset to night sequence. Due to transport issues this opportunity was missed instead, this sequence was replaced by the Sky 100 sequence. 

Post Production

The workflow for the post production of Limitless was simple but very time consuming. All images were imported into Lightroom for colour correction and colour grading. The transitions in each sequence was processed through LR TImelapse.  Finally, all sequences were exported in Lightroom for editing in Premiere. The editing in Limitless was very minimal. Majority of the sequences were static while some sequences had simple scale effects. Most of the post production time was spent in Premiere to render previews and multiple drafts ensure that the final version was perfect.  

Thoughts

I'm really happy with how the final film turned out but why did it take so long to finish? Uni. heh. I put this project on hold for about a year until I saw Morten Rustad's Seasons of Norway Timelapse a few months ago which inspired me to finish what I started.  From working on this project, I learnt how to use LR Timelapse and refigure how to use Premiere. However, the most important thing I learnt from this project is patience. In the shooting phase, I had to be extremely patient and wait for the camera run its timelapse sequence so I had to find ways to make use of the time I had. However, in the post production phase, I never felt that I had the time to sit around for a couple hours waiting for images to be processed and previews to be rendered. In the end, I knew that by spending more time on this project, it would make the final film much more refined.

The timelapse film was pretty simple but I think using some form of motion control would have definitely made the film much more dynamic. I wished I knew that the trial version of LR Timelapse had a 400 image limit because I ended up wasting a lot of photos. Overall, I'm extremely proud of what I created for my first timelapse film, hopefully I will create more timelapse films in the future. :)