23 October 20244:36200 views on YouTubeWatch on YouTube
A timelapse of a single day is easy. A timelapse of a year is a scheduling problem. Year in Flight is an attempt at the harder version: the same drone, the same lake, the same flight path, flown once a week for fifty two weeks, so that the finished piece can move through an entire year in a few minutes without the frame ever jumping.
The plan
The subject is Little Carnelian Lake in Stillwater, Minnesota, filmed from above the clouds on a DJI Air 3, running from October 2024 to October 2025. The discipline is the whole idea. Because the path is identical every week, the differences between clips are only the things that actually changed: the light, the weather, the colour of the trees, the state of the water. Those clips can then be morphed into each other rather than cut, which is what turns fifty two separate flights into one continuous shot.
The first flight went wrong in a useful way
The opening flight was not supposed to look like this. The program was set to launch at 6:22 in the evening and launched at 6:22 in the morning instead, an AM and PM mix up of the kind that ruins most shoots. What it produced was a foggy autumn sunrise, with the drone climbing through cloud and the lake appearing underneath it. It is a better opening frame than the one that was planned, and it sets the tone for everything that follows.
The soundtrack
The first flight is scored to “Time” by Hans Zimmer, which is a fitting choice for a project whose only real subject is time passing over one small piece of water.
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