Watching Bethel

This was rendered yesterday and slightly different from the rest, it goes at a slower speed. As I write I am working on what I hope are the final steps towards filtering out all of the night and weekend shots. I know I am making some progress at any rate.

Previous time lapses can be found here, the first post on the subject here. Links provided mostly because this post is aimed at a certain high level person at Bethel whom I hope is able to find some use of this.

As long as I am at that, I have to thank Dr. KT for pressing me to show this to others at Bethel, I know that at least one high level person found it very helpful.

I don't think I ever told the story of how I started this project and it is kind of funny. Basically, a little over a year ago, I was sitting in a classroom. Slightly better than the dungeons of the HC (a nasty set of classrooms at BU), but no windows and right next to the building you can see above. I could feel the tremblings of the bulldozers.

I knew that last time BU had setup a major building project (the new dorms) they had set up a webcam. I even know someone that found the IP address of the webcam and found that s/he could pan/zoom it via their browser, but I digress.

Wanting a "window" to the outside I searched for the new Commons project on Bethel's website and indeed found the webcam. At first I just watched it in class (meaning, for the first day or something like that.) I quickly realized that it would make a pretty cool time lapse. Where "pretty cool" means that I would get a kick out of it. I like doing time lapses and have set up a couple on my own for, well, fun.

That really was the whole point and genesis of this project -- it was fun and I could do it. Usefulness was never really considered (hence the thanks to Dr. KT). By today I am just short of collecting 400 days worth of photos. I grab them both hourly in one set and by the minute in another set. The set shown has always been the former. The latter is the one I am working on to "perfect."

Guess we'll see how that goes in the coming days. It takes a little bit of time to render these (viz., putting all the relevant pictures into a video) especially on a computer that is at least 8 years old.