Welcome to Sydney from Sharkie on Vimeo.
I moved to Sydney in early 2012 for a two year job, and immediately found a city that was a photographer’s paradise. The inspiration for making a timelapse of the city comes from from the film Baraka (1992) and another Vimeo timelapse, The City (vimeo.com/29298709).
As time lapse has grown more popular, I've seen an increase in bad production. Too many films are littered with overuse of motion rigs, special effects, or dramatic cinema tracks without telling any sort of story. I wanted to capture Sydney in the way I experienced and keep it simple. I am very happy with the end product.
Principal photography began in mid-2012, and went on sporadically through March of 2014 when I departed for America. Upon returning to Sydney in September 2015, I shot four new sequences seen in the film. In particular, the one shot at Barangaroo Reserve would not have been possible before in initial photography as it opened to the public in 2015. But along with the new there is some old: the film features both the now defunct Sydney Monorail, and nighttime traffic on George Street which will become a memory with the installation of the light rail in the CBD.
The overwhelming majority of photos were shot in RAW format at full resolution of 5730 x 3840 pixels. Over 100,000 photos were taken, requiring storage space of 1.8 Terabytes (!!) before processing. Initial image processing and correction was then done in Adobe Photoshop. Photos were then assembled in Sequence (frosthaus.com/sequence/) and brought over to Apple Final Cut Pro for editing. In all, the entire production took me well upwards of 500 hours to complete.
I hope you find the film enjoyable. If you like it, please share it with your friends and colleagues!
Equipment:
Cameras: Canon EOS 5D Mark II and Mark III
Lenses:
• 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye
• 16-35mm 2.8L USM
• 24-105mm f/4L IS USM
• 50mm f/1.4 USM
• 85 f/1.2 II USM
Filters:
• Heliopan Neutral Density 3.0 Filter
• Singh Ray Vari-ND Variable Neutral Density Filter