Timelapse Photography: The Lion City II – Majulah

Photography Tips  •  Time-lapse Photography

Timelapse photography is a long term commitment that takes time and dedication. And nobody shows just how painstakingly devoted you must be more than photographer and filmmaker Keith Loutit. For his amazing timelapse masterpiece, The Lion City II – Majulah, Loutit spent more than 500 days over a span of 3 years capturing all of the footage. His goal for the film was to showcase the city in a new light, revealing the various changes to the landscapes over time:

The video consists of over 70 different locations, with over 100 photographed sequences, leaving Loutit with terabytes of data. Unfortunately, hard drives are known to fail, and with a project this size, he didn’t want to take any chances. Loutit chose to avoid purchasing hard disk space, selecting to use a local drive to store the footage and backing up the information on Google Drive.

The majority of the imagery was captured using two Nikon D4 cameras due to the strength of their carbon fiber shutters.

Loutit took on the project independently as a way to honor his adopted home of 12 years. However, due to its location, Singapore is a very challenging place to shoot a timelapse. Singapore is located along the equator; the sun spends half its time in the Northern Hemisphere and half its time in the Southern Hemisphere, which creates different light angles. To overcome this challenge, Loutit had to continuously calculate the sun’s path and make adjustments to the time frames he captured footage.

“No, the long term construction moves are not CGI. The most significant post work was blending shots from different times of day, or different days into composites.”