About creation of "Paris Day & Night" Video Clip

This article is all about the most complex and interesting we faced when were shooting our movie about Paris. If you are interested in what remains behind the scenes and you have any questions about the process of creating this work, seat back, we will tell you all.

Some of you may not be familiar with the technique of creating such a video and don't know the meaning of words timelapse and hyperlapse, so we start from a little bit of theory.

Time lapse is frame-by-frame exposure of spontaneous events at regular intervals. In urban environment this technique is used to shoot movement of the sky and clouds, transport and human traffic, sunrises and sunsets, etc.

Hyper lapse is a kind of time lapses where a camera moves along a certain trajectory, while nothing may occur in the frame, but it will result in effect of the camera flight or motion around the main subject.

All the time lapses and hyper lapses are shot as a sequence of snapshots. An interval used by the camera to shoot is set on the camera or using an external remote control. If the time lapse is static then, after an interesting view been selected, you should fix the camera on a tripod and wait until it will shoot the desired number of frames with the specified time interval. In hyper lapses an operator moves the camera at specified (often the same) distances, choosing the subject that will be the camera "flight" center.

After the first successful test shot of the Eiffel Tower we deepened for a couple of weeks into planning of a video clip. We needed to define clearly what we want to show to the audience. It seems that Paris is so famous city that all of its sights are already familiar from books, movies and stories. Yet there are places deprived of attention, and we tried not to forget about them on the backdrop of the most famous symbols of Paris. Our list contained about 95 key points: fountains, obelisks, sculptures, monuments, clocks, railway stations, bridges, museums, parks, gardens, avenues, squares, as well as the metro entrances and unusual monuments. It was a guide compiled by our own hands. These are sights that make Paris the city we see and like. We had no problem to get around and shoot all these places. We had to start and then to act using the footage.

We would like to add a faithful assistant to the equipment list: an iPhone with the app Sunfollower, that predicted the sun position for any point in the city and for the specified time moment. Thus we did not have to wait for the right light on the site. We knew in advance the time when the necessary subject will be properly illuminated.

Oh yeah, the weather itself was the second our director and helped the city. Sometimes we had to cancel the shooting because of the extreme cold or rain. But such situations were very few, and in general the weather in Paris was excellent. Surprisingly, but the November was colder than the December, and we had to wear two pairs of gloves in order not to freeze during the shooting. On December the real spring came, without snow and rain.

Hyper Lapses instead of Drone

You can shoot hyper lapses using various ways. To do it there is a lot of equipment that stabilizes the image, and its main goal is to simplify the complex process of time-lapse photography. But this video clip, including flights over the city, we were shooting classically, without extra gadgets.

To shoot a 3-second lapse with the camera hovering like a copter over Paris, you should shoot 72 snapshots and say "excuse me" and "excusez-moi" about 10 times. The point is that for such "flights" we used the viewing points of the Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and other places that offer a wonderful view of the city. If you are already familiar with technique of shooting hyper lapses, it won’t be a secret for you that to shoot the beautiful snapshot using a mobile camera you need to find the subject and a direct trajectory, on which base you will be able to control the smooth movement of the camera. It may be level surface of outdoor tiles or an even handrail. There always are fences in viewing points, and these fences are usually these handrails that may be used to move the camera. But the main obstacle for the shooting was not technical issues but people who are massively occupy all handrails of viewing points. Therefore, to shoot accurately with the camera displacement, we had to apologize and ask to step away from the handrail for a moment hundreds of times. It is very difficult to do it singly, though snapshots from the Notre Dame were shot by one person. But usually we shot in tandem: one is shooting and completely deepening in the process, and the other one is communicating with tourists, explaining why we will need access to the specific handrail in 30 seconds. In these circumstances the time plays a part of the main and very moody actor. When shooting time-lapse clips, you need to snapshot at regular intervals to smooth the motion of objects (such as clouds). So you cannot just wait until someone will step away.

The time was important globally too. The leaves were beginning to fall in December, the trees were becoming bare, and beautiful streets were being covered with Christmas sale tents, which ugly backs appeared in the shot and obscured the desired perspective. Thus, the concept got some changes, and we had to move the scenes with dense green tree canopies away from the scenes with bare branches, editing the clip. In some cases we repainted green leaves into yellow during postproduction.

Round Fence

Scenes shot from roofs are not the main part of the video clip, but the principle of shooting from the straight handrails we used many times.

Ever and again Paris offered us to use its ornate small fences and fencing. For example one of the Place des Victoires monuments we wanted to shot for sure: the monument to King Louis XIV that is known as the "King the Sun". The square itself has an unusual geometry: it is perfectly round, and even the facades of houses forming it are rounded by its contour. The monument in the square center is also surrounded by a perfectly round fence with spikes that protrude at the equal distances and are convenient to fix the camera. How cool it would be to take along such a fence resembling a giant circular slider and to place it around the other picturesque sights.

Shooting with a Tripod

In addition to the mini-trolley and the magic linoleum, we used a conventional tripod. The choice of method to fasten the camera for shooting depends not only on what is more convenient to use for shooting, but on the task too. When we roll the camera on wheels over the surface, the movements are not as tangible as when the camera is moved on the tripod. To shoot a scene with the tripod, you should move the camera strictly along the prepared trajectory that was accurately marked on the ground. For example, paving slabs fit for this binding. It is also important to fix the camera itself so that the frame center point will be always aimed to the object "pixel by pixel". Any inaccuracy while shooting complicates subsequent stabilization of the image during editing the clip.

A transparent adhesive tape is almost always attached to the screen of our camera. This tape piece contains an "aiming sight" on it, which is just a point painted with a marker. Before each frame you have to aim the camera to superpose the selected point on the subject with the marked point on the camera. We have long accustomed to this method of combining images. You can always stick a transparent film or tape on the camera screen, and then make marks on the screen with thin marker without risk of the camera damage.

Postproduction and Stabilization

Almost every evening we turned on automatic rough assembling of all the footage for this day. Thus, we planned the project timeline to understand better what defining points we needed for the whole picture. It helped to choose in the morning the places to go and shoot missed scenes.

As a result, the rough edited material duration was about 11 minutes. This material required more thoughtful analysis and high-quality image stabilization, and we were puzzled by these tasks already in Moscow.

By the way, about the stabilization. Perhaps, many readers that are not specializing in video production, not quite understand what stabilization we have mentioned several times. The fact is that it is not enough to make several dozens of images by moving the camera in the space at regular intervals to obtain a beautiful smooth picture. Shooting is only half of the story. The second half is to process images and to combine them into a smooth video. To do it, you need rotate and move each snapshot using software (in this case, Adobe After Effects and Mocha Pro) in few pixels to combine the snapshot perfectly with its neighbors. Thanks to technologies that help us to save time and in most cases stabilize video in a semiautomatic mode. But, of course, we had to align some scenes manually, frame by frame. This stabilization may take a long time. This video contains scenes, which alignment took us several days.

It is important to understand that the more accurately you shoot the footage, the easier you will stabilize it and then create a beautiful live picture from the set of photos.

Let’s return to the editing. When all the scenes have been prepared and stabilized, you need to gather them in a single video with specific logic. We have really a lot of footage, and discarding extra scenes is not the most pleasant work. From the 11 minutes we had to get about 5 planned minutes, and it meant that we had to get rid of half of the footage. First of all we excluded the scenes with stabilization problems, where the picture was not pure enough (in comparison with other frames). Then we began to assemble the remained material in one video clip, reducing duration of scenes or throwing very vague moments. In any creative process the most difficult thing is to refuse part of the finished material, which creation was, of course, a serious work. But we have done this travail, and then invited Sergey Akimov, a professional video editor, to help us with final editing. He spent few days to handle the footage and discarded some more scenes. We had no heart to remove them because to shoot these frames had been not an easy affair. However, a fresh look is always able to breathe new life into the project. Sergey made a number of changes in the edited material where something was going amiss to our mind.

In total, we shot about 1 terabyte of material in RAW format, and then we carefully turned it into this mini-movie about Paris.

About Paris

We still think that Paris is a city that was specially created to shoot movies. In this city all the buildings are worth to see. It is a museum city. We could not understand why people are standing in long queues to the Louvre, if they can just walk and examine the architecture and geometry of the city. We visited the Louvre only on the 85th day of our live in Paris. Of course, it is interesting to see a pillow artfully sculptured under the girl-boy body. But Mona Lisa charms already not with her eyes, but with two ads on its sides: "Beware of pickpockets". The center of Paris is mainly low-rise. For tourists there are many viewing sites, from which you can shoot comfortably.

In Paris there is a great network of urban bicycle rental Velib and bicycle road strips connecting all parts of the city, a lot of bicycle parking, established cycling of bicycle transport, low speed of vehicles, friendly car drivers. All this helps to move quickly around the city and to enjoy every small picturesque street.

And football fans may seem aggressive but, in fact, they are just very glad for their team. Have you noticed flashes lighted up the house next to the Moulin Rouge in one of the video scenes? This is the story I want to tell apart. One evening we went with linoleum and the camera on the wheels to shoot the Moulin Rouge. To determine the exposure of the frame we calculated how many seconds it takes the mill to make the quarter of the turn and started shooting. But during the shooting a crowd of people of Arab appearance with fireworks suddenly appeared. Something told us that we need to go away urgently. It was unclear what they wanted. But we kept shooting, because the beginning was good and we didn’t want to leave this scene unfinished. One of the guys came up to us and asked what we were doing and why we laid linoleum on the ventilation shaft. We explained everything to him, and then he immediately wished good shots. And he shouted to the other crowd asking not to interfere us. Indeed, we continued to shoot, and they continued to have fun. So we divided the square into halves. The reason for their joy was the ball scored in the Ukrainian national team gates by their compatriot at the Paris Stade de France.

In Paris the police is good-hearted and, in contrast to Moscow, you have freedom to make photos in the metro. For all the shooting, and sometimes we were shooting very long, twisting in one place in strange poses, the police came to us a couple of times only. Once it happened in the metro. At that time we filmed at the station, putting a piece of linoleum on the platform and half-sitting, aiming all the time, not looking away from the camera screen, and move it to small distances. The police simply asked what we were doing, they were wondering what was put under the camera. Of course they wished us good shooting.

Like many people, Paris charmed us from the first glance, despite the fact that our first glance was at the airport and then at the North Station. Paris is a contrast city and therefore it is very interesting one.

Paris became not only our director, but also the main actor of this film.


About the creative team.
Our names are Constantine Konovalov and Irina Neustroeva, we are form creative association Teeter-totter-tam. Basically, we work in Moscow and create stop motion animation, time lapses, video and graphics.
The music composer and sound designer Fab Martini from Italy is writing music and sounds for our works.
For cooperation please contact us by e-mail:


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