Professional Time Lapse New Zealand
From 1999 for the next 4 years Ryan worked passionately on a range of cutting edge motion control software solutions based around the Stäubli range of articulated industrial robots. These systems allowed producers to use an off the shelf industrial robot married up to large cinematic or time lapse cameras to achieve a range of mind blowing sequences and 3D actions that were previously un-heard of. In 2003 due to a change in focus, Ryan passed on all rights to the various software solutions developed for the Stäubli products and discontinued future development on this platform.
The market changed considerably in about 2003 when Nikon introduced the D2H, this was widely regarded as one of the first true commercial grade DSLR cameras that professionals really brought into. This changed everything on the Time Lapse scene, no longer were Time Lapse producers attached to extremely large and heavy rigs and dolly’s made to support massive cinematic film cameras, the support vans full of tapes, racks of computer gear and associated equipment very quickly started to disappear as videographers came to grip with using digital single-lens reflex cameras to shoot their footage onto memory cards and hard discs instead of shooting onto film or complex video capture systems that required astronomical amounts of post production.
At about this point Ryan took a step back from developing software systems for extremely high end hardware and watched the market for several years to see what direction producers took, primarily around whether digital was here to stay or would film remain the predominant medium for motion time lapse capturing. Things very quickly went digital which has meant that the equipment required to do these shoots reduced in size and weight to almost nothing allowing the design of ultra-low cost dollies and motion control systems to be born and in the hands of photographers and videographers outside of major film studios.
Recently Ryan has been working with an American based company on software control systems for a time lapse platform based on a mid-range cartesian coordinate robot, this work has lead the company onto experimenting and prototyping many motion and time lapse control rigs including a 6 axis motion control dolly that is now in use at numerous production facilities around the world.
If you need anything to do with Time Lapse or Motion Control, Ryan is available at info@protimelapse.co.nz
