From Guest to Baby
I tried hard to come up with a cool, catchy title, and that was all I could muster. Hopefully the content will make up for the lameness. With Parker on the way, we knew we had to transform one of our extra bedrooms into the baby room, and would consolidate the guest bedroom and office into one room. I, of course, couldn’t do this the normal way, and wanted to do my best to document the transformation of the room.
First, I was a little late getting started. I had moved the guest bed out by the time I decided to start this endeavor, so that was never captured. My first thought was to shoot time lapse video using a video camera. The problem with that is that the work being done on the room was going to take place over quite a long period of time. I also wanted to be able to control when the camera was capturing, so I wouldn’t record tons of dead time. My final solution came in the form of a still camera. Christina and I own 2 cameras. My beloved Canon Digital Rebel XT and our trusty Canon S1IS, the camera we got as a Christmas present the year we got married. We had thought the S1IS had disappeared for over a year, only for it to show up (under the seat of Christina’s car) after we had replaced it. So it had been relegated to be the backup camera, the camera to take to the beach when on vacation, etc… Being a Canon, I was able to install software on my iMac to control it remotely via USB. I was even able to capture the images directly on the computer.
In order to mount the camera, I used a shelf bracket, the head from an old tripod, and some screws from the garage. I wanted maximum room coverage, so I put it in the corner by the door. I also needed continuous power so I wouldn’t have to keep taking it down to change batteries and then guess at the correct replacement of the camera, causing tons of movement in the final video.
After getting the camera up and taking a few pics with the iMac, I realized that I wasn’t going to be happy with the focal length. The shot was not near wide enough. I could only see maybe half of the room. I knew I had an old, cheap video wide angle adapter, so I fished it out of the garage gear stash and worked on a way to attach it to the S1IS. I ended up using the cheapest, easiest, and most universal method to attach it: duct tape.
The biggest problem with this (other than how it looks), is that whenever the camera turns off, it attempts to pull the lens back into the body of the camera. When it can’t do this, it freaks out. I had to untape the wide angle and reboot the camera a couple of times in the setup. The final solution was to always keep the camera on, always keep the USB plugged in, and never turn off the computer. If I broke any of the rules, the setup would be ruined. Once during the renovation the wide angle fell off, so I climbed up on a ladder and retaped it. I can’t really tell in the final video the moment that this happened, which is a good thing. So now, any time that I started working in the room I would set the interval timer shooting mode to shoot every X seconds (15 seconds usually, but sometimes more or less depending on how quick the work I was doing went). I was nearly done with the room when the camera flaked out on me and quit working. Oh well, I’ll post some real pictures of the room with everything else in it later. Here is the final video:
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Very nice!
That was great! I liked spotting when Izze would show up.
I was wondering, did the camera motivate you? I was impressed that I never really saw you plop down and watch something on the iMac for a while or anything. If you were in the room, you were working.
Also, something we have in common, several times during the project you would clean up. I think that’s actually a unique thing to do. Several people Ive worked with, including Linz, will clean up at the end of the project, not at any time during.
What was the time-lapse? I didnt watch the window so I cant venture a guess. :p
It really took place over a pretty long period of time (12/13 – 1/5). I just looked at the images and I took 2548 pictures in all. The trick was that I didn’t set the camera to capturing except when it was time to work. It would have been as boring as watching paint dry. (I did 3 coats of paint, and 2 coats of stain plus 1 coat varnish on the wardrobe. Lots of drying time in between coats).
I really can’t stand to leave projects undone, so whenever I could I would set to working on something I did (which included cleaning up while things dried). Also notice that many times I was in the room Christina was “supervising”.
Oh yeah, and Izze loved it when I worked in there. I had to shut her out sometimes because I’m sure she would have loved to have played with the paint. She was always climbing all over whatever I was working on at the time.
Very cool – needs music, though. Maybe the Benny Hill Theme music…of course, you know how often I’ve tried to work that into videos around here.
unfortunately i am unable to watch the video (on a locked down computer where i can’t install quicktime), but i will watch when i get home.
from your description of rigging up the camera unit, it sounds like capturing the project was a significant project in itself. my pre-projects often take as much time as projects themselves as well. that and a minimum of 3-4 trips to home depot/lowes per project.
cheers.