The timelapse movies don’t seem to have come as thick and fast as they did last year. There’s been a few good ones, showing rare events and unusual techniques. But still not in the quantities that 2016 brought. One person we can always rely on to give us some timelapse and hyperlapse eye-candy, though, is Kirill Neiezhmakov. In the film, White nights in Saint Petersburg, we’re taken on a tour of St Petersburg, Russia. We start in the evening, going through the night, with fireworks and a wild variety of coloured lights. Kirill’s got hyperlapse down to an art form, with some very cool tricks in post to take things to the next level.
St Petersburg is a stunning city, especially at night, as the video shows. It was shot at the end of June last year during a period of white night skies. It also fell during the “Scarlet Sails” holiday, which explains the crowds of people. To create film, Kirill used a pair of Canon EOS60D bodies, along with an EOS 70D. When it comes to lenses, though, he keeps quite the array in his bag.
Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8Samyang 8mm f/3.5Canon 17-55mm f/2.8Canon 70-200mm f/4L
And he uses them extremely well, too.
For the post work, Kirill uses a combination of Adobe After Effects, Lightroom and LRTimelapse. You can certainly see advantages the an application like After Effects has to offer. Beyond just the warp stabilizer, it allows for some very cool transitions. Complete control moving between different camera angles or even entire scenes. The simulated zoom with the bounce expression is a particularly nice touch. Kirill visits a lot of amazing locations to make his timelapse and hyperlapse films. I can’t wait to see where he ends up next.
