This is the mural at Shepparton Library, painted by Mimi Leung. It's 17x3 meters and it took 55 hours to create. As Mimi's my wife, I took the opportunity to experiment a bit with my make-shift time-lapse gadgets, less concerned than usual about the errors inherent to trial and error.
For the scrolling shots, I didn't have thousands to spend on sliders but I did have a skateboard and some fishing line. These, combined with a BBQ rotisserie motor I found for $24 made a pretty decent scrolling effect.
The decking made for quite a bumpy ride though and the wheels would get stuck in the dips between slats and lurch forward when the tension in the fishing line was strong enough.
My first improvement was to make the ride as smooth as possible so I hunted around local flooring shops for old laminate off cuts. These were too smooth though. The tension in the wire would build up and when it moved the skateboard wheels the surface was so smooth that the skateboard would roll forward a few centimetres, come to a stop and then wait for the tension to build up again. Another uneven time-lapse slider.
My tests on the office carpet were the best so far so the next trip to the flooring shop was for skateboard width carpet offcuts. To my delight the friction was just enough and the skateboard wheeled along at an even pace. Lovely.
Next, I wanted a slower version of the kitchen timer panning effect. A $4 24hr electric timer, some blutac and a piece of wood worked a treat. The only downside to the egg timer was that it needed to be plugged in, but otherwise I love this unassuming rig.
Finally, rather than just lay some musak underneath, I composed a piece to try and keep all sounds relating to the artist's movements on the screen. I found the more stripped back the more effective it was.
