Rumble and Sway: An Epic New York City Time-Lapse ‘Mixtape’

It wouldn’t be the weekend without a little bit of time-lapse inspiration. So as you’re getting ready to enjoy another Sunday packed with football and fun, check out this epic NYC time-lapse and hyperlapse compilation put together by the guys over at The Seventh Movement.

The Seventh Movement consists of a pair of best friends, Thom and Vin. And perhaps even cooler than the time-lapse you see above (but only perhaps) is the story behind what it is they do and how they do it so well.

First the “what.” The Seventh Movement is primarily a time-lapse broadcasting team — in plain English that means that networks like ESPN have them create short, broadcast-ready time-lapse sequences and turn them around in less than 24 hours. The video above is put together from 321 different shots the duo captured for the 2013 US Open broadcast on ESPN.

Many of these sequences were used by ESPN in athlete features, bumpers for the matchups and daily teases like this one:

Since it’s just them two doing all of the work — and we mean all: shooting, editing, coloring and delivery — and the deadlines are so tight, they tend to use a lot of gear all at once. For the shots above, they showed up in NYC with six Canon 5D Mark IIIs and two RED Epics. They also brought along a Kessler Crane CineDrive system and a few Dynamic Perception Stage Zero systems.

Their lens selection is no less impressive either. When we caught up with Thom via email, he told us what kind of glass they carry:

For most of the wide shots, we use the Canon 17mm TS-E or the Zeiss 15mm. Those two pieces of glass give you an ultra flat and ultra wide image. The other lens we use all the time is the Canon 8-15mm fisheye lens.

We shoot these wide time-lapse at 8mm and run them through an application called panolapse to flatten the circular image out and add a pan or tilt. The results are stunning. Other items in our kit include the entire Zeiss kit (15, 21, 35, 50, 85, 100) and the Canon TS-E kit (17, 24, 45, 90).

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Like we said before, the process is perhaps more impressive than the final product. It’s one thing to put together some awesome time-lapse shots in New York City. It’s quite another to get those shots broadcast ready and in ESPN’s hands in 24-hours.

Be sure to watch the video at the top for yourself, and if you’d like more info on the specific challenges The Seventh Movement encountered when putting all of these shots together, check out this in-depth interview Thom gave for Kessler University.

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