One and a half years ago, Jesse Chandler set out to shoot a time lapse of his favorite city in the world. He describes these sped-up landscapes as “halfway between a video clip and a photo.” His completed videos feel like photographs come to life.
Creating a quality time lapse is no easy feat. This project took nearly 400 hours to shoot and another 300 to edit. “It’s so easy to fuck it up,” he tells me. “You need to be aware of foot traffic. People constantly wandering into the shot will ruin it.” Location is key, and sometimes multiple attempts still fail. “I spent five days on the Avenue of Palms on Treasure Island to get that ‘henge’ shot of Golden Gate Bridge, where the sun peeks through perfectly, but it never worked out,” Jesse explains. “But on another shoot, I was able to capture a blood moon.” His efforts in filming Sutro Tower gave him strep throat. It is nothing if not an incredible commitment.
After the monumental efforts of shooting the footage, Jesse had to figure out a way to engage audiences. A self-professed “technology nerd,” Jesse says he would “constantly watch time lapses in cool travel videos, trying to figure out how the images were captured.” But he knows that the average viewer isn’t likely to watch even 15 seconds of anything uninterrupted unless it can fight for their attention. Jesse sheepishly explains his geometric editing technique as “a trick to get people to watch three minutes of time lapses.”
I spent five days on the Avenue of Palms on Treasure Island to get that ‘henge’ shot of Golden Gate Bridge, where the sun peeks through perfectly, but it never worked out, but on another shoot, I was able to capture a blood moon.
He stumbled across the editing technique on a series of YouTube tutorials, eventually spending hours on Adobe Premier, experimenting with shapes and movements that felt organic and referential to the sweeping movements of the camera. Many of the moments that have been fine-tuned in this final product were the products of mistakes. Much of his time was spent trying to figure out the natural progression of clips — the lighting changes from day to dusk, or, in Jesse’s word, “what people are really watching these for.”
His joy for the project is evident in the vistas and peaks of our city. Like many of us, he works multiple side hustles in service of making art. In fact, “Making art” was the Google Calendar label for the time slots he dedicated to this project. You can watch Jesse’s video here (and don’t forget to set it to 4K quality, full screen):
