Tate produced this time-lapse film in conjunction with the specialist broadcast media company SASVR, who spent over a fortnight filming the installation process for Rachael Whiteread’s works from a variety of angles.
It was quite a challenge to condense more than two weeks’’work by the art handlers into just over two minutes, as seen here. Two broadcast-quality digital video cameras were linked up to two Macs running time-lapse software, so that all of the frames were captured directly to the computer. This gave great flexibility in terms of frame-rate and time-slices.
One camera was located high above the Duveen Galleries on what is known to staff as ‘The Bridge’ to give the overview. A second camera was used at ground level in various locations to capture what couldn’t be seen from above.
The original sample rate was one frame every nine seconds, which – at the 25 frame-per-second frame rate for UK TV – would give one second of completed time lapse video every 3.75 minutes. This compressed our fortnight down to about eleven minutes.
Our final edit of just over two minutes was created on a Media 100 Online edit system which was then compressed for the internet using RealProducer.