Love it or hate it, vertical video is becoming more than just people holding their phones incorrectly. More and more, the screens we look at the most are vertically oriented. Now that Instagram has broken out of the square, I wanted to try creating a time lapse video that fits in those vertical phone screens.
My first opportunity came on a foggy morning in Blendon Woods Metro Park. There is a meadow near Thoreau Pond that is part of the Walden Waterfowl Refuge and is off limits to hiking. You can observe the meadow from the trail. On this particular morning there was thick fog hovering over the tall meadow plants and I wanted to get a time lapse of it. I couldn’t find a horizontal composition that I liked because of the limited vantage points and the trees at the edge, so I tried a vertical composition.
Unless you’re recording and uploading the video or time lapse on your smart phone, there are some extra hurdles to overcome creating vertical videos. Most of the desktop software I use is setup only for horizontal video. Youtube is making progress in displaying vertical video on mobile devices, but embedding them here was a huge pain. Because the video is 1920px tall Youtube assumes the videos below are a much higher resolution than they really are.
Click 1080HD to see and hear the best version.
Music is “Darkling Skies” by Jelsonic from freemusicarchive.org
I also tried a vertical sunrise time lapse a couple days later. Setting up in the dark, I had to guess exactly where the sun would rise above the far shore, but I got pretty close. I was excited when it looked like I might get a “double” sunrise when the sun rose then went behind a narrow band of dark clouds. Just as it rose again above the clouds, I ran out of room on my memory card. D’oh!
Click HD to see and hear the best version.
Music is “Vapour Trails” by Jelsonic