While on vacation, I finally had a chance to do a little project I had been planning for a while. A few months ago I got the UCS Lego Batmobile (Set 7784) for about a third of msrp. I had also been playing with Nikon Camera Control for a little while and had been trying to think of a cool time-lapse project. I decided to bring the set with me in the event of a day on vacation that we decided to just take it easy, and sure enough one of those came along. The result is below, though it looks like google video made the images a bit crummy.

For anyone that hasn’t done this type of thing before, it’s pretty simple, at least at this amateur hour level of quality. You’ll need some way of controlling the camera. This could be done manually, or in my case I used Nikon Camera Control Pro Software for Windows and Mac. Camera control Pro allows you to control several aspects of your camera. One of which is a time-lapse feature where you specify how frequently to take the picture, and what to do with it, including download it directly to your computer to avoid filling your memory card.

You’ll also need a tripod. I set mine up so it looked down at the table roughly at a 45 degree angle. This gave me a trapezoidal view of my building area. I marked my boundaries with masking tape, which mostly matched the color of the table. This way I knew what would be captured and what would not. Important for keeping the bottle of beer off screen as you work. ;-) Finally, when the capture process was complete, I batch resized my images (while preserving the originals) with Adobe Fireworks to a size more appropriate for DV video size (720×480) then imported the files to Adobe Premiere as an ordered sequence. Finally export your movie and thats it!

If you don’t have Premiere, you could use either Windows Movie Maker, or iMovie depending on your platform. Sorry Linux Folks, don’t know what you have available, but I bet there’s lots of it.

The process was smooth, and a great proof of concept of doing time lapse. I did find however it is a power consuming process. Over the 2-3 hour process of shooting a frame every 2 minutes I drained a mostly filled battery. Which means, to do a full day project you would need the AC adapter for your camera.

As for the build, it was fun! The Batmobile was very cool. A lot of neat details, the one thing I was upset about was the lack of steering. The front wheels drive the gears that simulate an engine, while the steering wheel raises and lowers the front armor over the turbine intakes. There were also a lot of great parts in the set. Lots of roof pieces and wedges that could be used in castles or other vehicles. For now it’s still one of the few assembled sets in my house. We’ll see how long it stays together. To have lasted this long is a feat for sure.