Times Square Time-Lapse Captures the Madness that is New Year’s Eve in NYC

Thanks to CES, this week has been filled to bursting with new gear announcements that are either exacerbating your Gear Acquisition Syndrome (G.A.S.) or simply exhausting you. After all, how many “world’s first [this]” and “world’s lightest [that]” can you take before it all starts to blend together?

So today, although we have more cool gadgets and gizmos from CES 2014 to share with you, we thought we’d start the day (well, in the US it’s the start of the day…) by reliving one of the biggest parties of the New Year in time-lapse.

If you live in the United States and you were anywhere near a TV on New Year’s Ever, chances are good that you counted away the last seconds of 2013 while watching a massive crystal ball descend above Times Square. It’s a tradition that is over 100 years old, with the first NYC ball drop having taken place on December 31st 1907.

In the above video by The Timelapse Group, we get to see how massive this tradition has really gotten. The first Times Square celebration of the New Year was in 1904, and some 200,000 attended. This last New Year the crowd was expected to reach one million.

So if you missed it, or if you just want to see an interesting time-lapse of a world-famous event, click play at the top and enjoy 18,000 still frames shot over the course of 12 hours using 10 still cameras set up on two hotel rooftops.

And when you’re done, you can get more information about the time-lapse and all the gear they used to capture it by heading over to Vimeo and reading the full video description.

(via Laughing Squid)