That’s my first ever attempt at time lapse photography. This was done on my iPhone using the free Gorillacam app. I learned two valuable lessons.

First, you need a stable mount. No, this didn’t interfere with the drive — promise — but wrapping the phone up in a Gorilla tripod isn’t the best solution. If anyone has an iPhone tripod idea, I’m listening.

The second lesson is shooting a drive isn’t the most dynamic choice. I didn’t expect it would be high art, but I got a lot of trees on a beautiful day. Somehow my time lapse managed to just miss every interesting thing — produce shacks, abandoned buildings, oncoming traffic, bridges with character — along the way.

But, I can now make a time lapse project. With the Gorillacam you can choose the number of pictures and the time increments. You get a bunch of pictures on your phone that you have to produce yourself. So, import, add to iMovie, edit the clips and add some music.

I went into Garageband and threw some beats together, made a few subtle edits and put it all together.

Once you get the workflow down this wouldn’t take long. The art, aside from the subject selection, is how long to make each image. And I’d guess that varies. Obviously, I don’t yet have the deft touch required for that.

Critiqued that study I mentioned yesterday. Here were my observations: the terms “young” and “old” were poorly conceived, the terms short and long (story length) were poorly defined and some of the hypotheses were more intuitive rather than conceptual. Essentially the study was about how story length and pacing impacted comparative recall in the case of young adults and older adults.

Young adults were defined as 18-22 — typical for an on-campus study where college age students are easy to draft as participants. Older adults were defined as 25-81. First of all, by this study’s definition I am old. And while I take playful exception to that, I argued that the idea of pacing and length in stories doesn’t vary that much between these simple measures. The median age in the older adults category was 44, but the remote control has been ubiquitous for most of those adults lives and their viewing habits have been conditioned to contemporary pacing, cuts, edits and story lengths just like the younger viewers. I’d buy the 81-year-old’s experience was difference, but not that the 25-year-old had that much of a marked change than a 22-year-old.

The idea of story length had some overlap. Stories were short if they were between 15 and 83 seconds. Long stories were defined between 40 and 185 seconds. Story length is an important consideration when you discuss cognition, recall and cognitive overload, so it is important to the study. But I can’t think of any good reason why a story that is 46 seconds could be called short, but a story that is 40 seconds could be called long.

And so on. It is a good paper and the results are compelling and practicable. It is one in a series by the Indiana scholars of which I’ve read several papers, so following the progression of their research is interesting.

The rest of the day was more reading, more writing. There was a trip to the grocery story, where I met a young man who was very excited about the football game this weekend. I looked for a business card I’ve hidden from myself. I’ve run out of places to search. Took a late evening nap — one of those drift away during the commercial break and wake up later in the same show affairs — which was wonderful until the 10 minutes after waking up where nothing made much sense.

Naps are funny that way. I seldom wake up disoriented in the morning, but a good nap leaves me confused. But it was refreshing, and now I’m wide awake. That’s always good.

And so I made the time lapse project. But that’s not all. I added a few more pictures to the Tumblr feed. That site is making a comeback and you can follow it there or see it on the right side of this page. The Glom covers will be added momentarily. And, of course, there will be something interesting tomorrow, too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 28th, 2010 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Alabama, iPhone, Thursday, Tumblr, video. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.