Shooting Cleaning the Office (2011)

By DTL
Posted November 8, 2011

I have been busy with many things for the past while, and became lax on the housekeeping. My home office was becoming increasingly cluttered with stuff heaped in there “just for the moment”. Finally, I had to face it: I was going to have to clean.

Here I present video proof of my magic powers. Behold! — the self-cleaning office:

Making this short video took less than an hour from start to finish. I set up a Canon Rebel XT still camera on a Manfrotto tripod and locked it off so it wouldn’t move. I zoomed out as far as possible to take in most of the room. I took a photo. I moved various objects two or three inches toward the door, and took another photo. Repeat as needed.

I wound up with 89 photos, which I imported into Adobe Premiere Pro. Then I laid the images on the timeline, one by one, for two frames per image. As I had selected a 24-fps project, that gave me twelve images per second. At that rate (what animators call “on twos”) the motion would still be acceptably smooth, and the 89 photos would yield a video of almost 7.5 seconds. Adding the opening title and the closing fade-out boosted the overall length to 11 seconds.

Sometimes doing a small nonsense project can boost your morale and be just plain fun!