"Stormy Flight" (Video, Timelapse)

"Stormy Flight" (Timelapse And Video) - More amazing videos are a click away

I guess I never should have expected that I'd take any time off without shooting and editing some kind of footage. This one was borne out of pure boredom, along with a volunteered bump.

With a freeze of flights into the east coast, I didn't get on the return trip home until past sunset. That's when I decided to try shooting time lapse pictures of the jet's take-off. At first I felt a bit steamed since we got airborn several minutes past sunset. And I sat on the left side of the jet to try capturing some footage. A storm, which had caused delays in the northeast corridor, still had some energy, with flashes of lightning ripping through the cloud deck below the plane. I set the camera on long exposure of one second, holding the trigger so the camera could capture images as quickly as it could.

Adding a mix of video footage whenever I could, I sat on the shutter button as the plane landed. Just now, I finished adding audio from iMovie HD, the software I used for editing, and a tune was added from the Internet Archive, which had a nice track by Pablo Reche that fit well at the end. The clip became a very foreboding piece with the lightning all over the area, and some of the ambient sound effects helped add that ominous dimension.

This was all captured using the Panasonic Lumix TZ3 hybrid camera, shooting with continuous mode (takeoff, landing, taxi scenes) and video mode (some of the airplane wings in flight; it simply looks like straight-shot footage). All scene editing and sound processing was done in iMovie, except for a little post-process tweaking of the titles in Final Cut Pro (I could have kept the titles in iMovie, but liked Final Cut a little more).

Below is the upload in Brightcove.

"Welcome to Baltimore" Video - Music by Igneous Flame

Welcome To Baltimore - The most popular videos are a click away

Take a setting in which you can't move, and try capturing it from as many different perspectives as you can. Given some time and a little creativity, you can start discovering some more creative ways to watch the world go by. I played with my own vision as I started recording the sights as the jet returned to BWI-Thurgood Marshall Airport from Manchester. Having grown tired of reading the in-flight magazine (which is usually the very same one that I had read on the way out), I started capturing some footage of the sun and clouds on an overcast day, while the plane began its descent.

Taking advantage of my Lumix TZ3 camera's 10X optical zoom lens, I tried finding some nice shots, and what I captured was because of the mood I was in at the time. By the time I got home, I wanted to piece it together. Some of the footage might be redundant, but I didn't want to trim too much. As I finished the clip, some music that I purchased, by Igneous Flame, kept going through my head. So I placed the track, "Lustral Sheen," from the album "SATU" into Final Cut, and the timing fit really well! The "darkly luminous" music couldn't have been more fitting. Igneous Flame (Pete Kelly) is right here, on MySpace as well. You should swing by and check the music out. If you like the track in the video, you must get the album.