New York Film Academy (NYFA) instructor James H. Coburn had a brand new camera he was still playing around with, and thought it would be a cool idea to take a motionlapse video of one of his classes—and he was right, it was cool.
The camera was a DJI Osmo Pocket, which can shoot in several modes including both time-lapse and motionlapse. Timelapse involves capturing an individual frame at set intervals, which helps show the passage of time over a much shorter time frame. Motionlapse involves the same concept, but with a pan or tilt in the camera movement.
Coburn put the DJI Osmo Pocket to the test over the course of a production workshop, where students from the Fall MFA in Cinematography program shot a film in a garage on a very hot day in Burbank, California—home of NYFA-Los Angeles.
Student director Derek Johnson filmed a process shot with a green screen and automobile over the course of several hours. All the students in the class had something to do on set and were busy throughout.
The motionlapse, which slowly pans across the set in what results in just two minutes of footage, capture the day’s shoot, which lasted over three hours, showing the students’ hard work as if honeybees in a hive.
Interested in working on a New York Film Academy production workshop one day? Check out the programs NYFA has to offer here.