The project is a short film celebrating my local area - we have a lot of local history, and despite living here all my life, I really quite like the place
The idea is to take timelapse photos of the area, 3 pics per second, taking 3 snaps of differing exposures - -1EV, 0EV and +1EV, then apply the HDR (high dynamic range) algorithms using Qtpfsgui on the command line to "HDR" the pictures up.
The only problem is that I'm hoping for 10 frames per second - even a 20 second clip would take 4 days to render, so I'm going to build a "network rendering" script that evenly distributes the work over my network.
This is going to take some time.
Here's an example of one still I took on Sunday morning:
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak- ... 5911_n.jpg
Anyway, the idea would be to animate the results using StopMotion or Blender (although I think I'd have quite a steep learning curve with Blender), then record a soundtrack using Ardour et al.
My camera, sadly, does not have a timelapse timer built in, so inkeeping with the OS philosophy, I am using an Arduino that is wired into the infra-red remote for the camera to short the switch that would normally require a human to press to activate the shutter every three seconds.
Currently, I'm doing most of this with a mixture of Python and/or shell scripts, although I hope to build a camera control language so I can set up the whoe scene in advance and set it off, meaning that if the results are not good due to weather or light, then I can simply wait until the time is right, then run the same program and capture the same camera work.