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Timelapse This technique is effectively an automated version of stop motion, which shoots at a very low but constant frame rate. Instead of shooting studio-based models it is usually used to capture organic motion or natural phenomena. Individual frames are recorded, at pretty normal exposures, but with large intervals in between. The interval could be anything from a few seconds to hours or even days. The concept is to rapidly speed up events otherwise impossible to easily observe, such as a flower growing, blooming, wilting and finally withering, or clouds rapidly speeding by, or the erection of a large building.

There are three basic ‘in camera’ techniques involved here: timelapse, where real world time is speeded up (usually very substantially); stop motion, where a synthetic time frame is created (usually for animation); and timeslice, where time is slowed down or completely frozen to allow three-dimensional scrutiny. These techniques are often undertaken by the main crew or by specialists, but also form an important part of the VFX toolkit. Stop frame/motion animation One of the best loved and earliest VFX techniques, stop frame animation was used in many of the great effects classics, through The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933) and Clash of the Titans (1981) to the present day when its techniques are being re-applied to computer graphics such as Jurassic Park (1993).

Again in normal photography this effect usually goes unnoticed but causes major headaches where images need to be combined. If the background is flat, but a blue screen foreground has bad geometric distortion, then as characters move across the floor they will appear to float above or sink into it. Obviously this depends on the shot, and where the image is close in will not matter, but in wide shots where lenses with different geometric aberrations are being used, it will create big problems in matching.