Model Day in 15 Seconds

You might be a bit bored with me playing with time lapse video.  If so, look away now!  Here comes another one.  We had guest visiting for the New Year and one of the things we took them to see was the scale model of the city.  The Chicago Architecture Foundation has a shop on Michigan Avenue and the building in which the shop is located has a large atrium.  In this atrium is a model of the city.

All of the buildings in the Loop and some of the surrounding areas have been accurately recreated using stereolithography.  This is a technique using resin and lasers that builds solid objects one minute slice at a time creating a solid object of great complexity.  If you are interested in the technique, head over to YouTube and search for the term and you will come across a number of videos showing it in action.

The model is set up in the atrium with custom lighting.  Apparently, the lighting is designed to recreate the pattern of the sun from sunrise to sunset over a 15 minute period.  I had been to the model a number of times and had shot details of it before.  This time, I decided I wanted to get a time lapse of the light progressing across the model to see how it came out.  Since I had the plan ready in advance, as soon as we got to the place, I set up the camera and then went back down to join the rest of the crew.  There is enough in the model to keep people interested for 15-20 minutes so I wasn’t going to delay everyone.  It did mean, however, that I had to carry a bunch of stuff around with me for the rest of our walk!

Enough of the back story.  Here is the video that resulted.  To be honest, I don’t think the lighting effects are as obvious as I had hoped that they would be.  However, you do get to see some of the movement of the light.

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