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Build an advanced DIY motion control slider for timelapse and stop motion animation

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Since initially discovering the Arduino, Eduard Puertas has spent a lot of time experimenting with it. It’s all an attempt to make his working life easier. As a stop motion animator, anything that makes his life easier is welcome. The Arduino allows him to automate many tasks that would be difficult to achieve manually. At the very least they’d take him a very long time to get perfect.

Eduard has built many automated motion control systems for his work based off the Arduino, including a slider. Now he’s revising his previous slider design to help improve things a little. He wants to keep the low weight while allowing for a larger load capacity.

The Art of the Timelapse and some of our favourite timelapses from 2016

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Timelapse seems to have exploded in 2016. Every other week, there’s a new one coming out trying to best the ones that came before it. Part of this boom is the ease with which cameras can shoot it now. Nikon has had built in timelapse features for years. Other DSLRs and mirrorless manufacturers have also started included timelapse capabilities over the last couple of years. Video editing software has become more intelligent in putting it all together, too.

This video from DigitalRev In-Focus introduces us to the history of timelapse. First demonstrated in 1897 by French filmmaker George Méliès, it quickly expanded to biologists. They used timelapse to show the growth of plants over time, leading to increased preservation of various parks.

This modular motion control slider fits in your backpack and can be reconfigured 30 different ways

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Sliders and motion control go together like bangers and mash. Or perhaps peanut butter & jelly for my American friends. Unless you just want a super quick grab shot, motion control makes work with a slider go so much more smoothly (pun intended). For timelapse, some form of motion control is pretty much essential for getting even and consistent slides or other camera movements.

There’s a million options already out there from companies like Kessler and Syrp, so what makes the new Starslider so special? Well, on the surface, not much, really. It strikes me as being very similar in application to Syrp’s family of motion control & slider products. But, it does look like it can handle substantially more weight and offer easier balancing with heavy cameras setups.

How to shoot and edit panoramic landscapes with the Syrp Genie Mini and Photoshop

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A couple of months ago, Syrp updated the firmware on the Genie Mini to add a couple of very cool new features. One of those was the ability to automate the shooting of panoramic still images for stitching. It’s not a difficult process to accomplish, but there are one or two gotchas and things you have to look out for.

In this video from The Slanted Lens, Jay P Morgan explains the whole process, from start to finish. With the New York cityscape as his subject, Jay walks us through setting up the Genie for the sequence, shooting the images, and then stitching them together in Photoshop.

Edelkrone adds motors and motion control from your phone to the SliderONE

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Edelkrone’s popular SliderONE is a pretty elegant and well made slider. Introduced at the end of 2015, the SliderONE is perhaps a little on the short side for some. But, when you only need to move small distances, it does its job extremely well. One thing it has lacked thus far, though, is any kind of motor or motion control system.

That all changes now with Edelkrone’s announcement of the new Motion Module. As one expect, it adds a motor to your slider, so you can get automate some of your process. Motors let you get smoother, cleaner, more even slides, and a whole bunch of other potential features. That’s where Edelkrone’s app comes into play, offering a wealth of options for both timelapse and video shooters.

This $99 device will motorize any slider

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There are some pricy (and awesome) motorized slider solutions out there (we quite like the Syrp Genie), but they are all kinda expensive. Anything with decent controls (screen/app) is 500$ or upwards. What if you throw some creative thinking into it?

Videographer Nitsan Simantov constructed a variable speed slider motor from a TurnsPro – a $99 egg timer style panning device (kinda like the Genie Mini we reviewed, but $150 cheaper). The idea is to use the TurnsPro as a push/pull device. Connect a piece of string to the thread of the revolving head and tie that string into the slider cart (this is why this built rang a bell with the Syrp Genie).

Syrp’s new Slingshot is a motion control zipline that lets you dolly your camera for hundreds of feet

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Creating super long slider or dolly shots is something many timelapse photographers and filmmakers dream about doing. For some, hyperlapse techniques and a lot of post production work is the answer. For others, that’s far too much work. When you look at the whole process, you can quickly see why. For others, the solution is a cable cam zipline type system.

It works with the Syrp Genie (review here), to provide you with a level of control that is otherwise difficult to achieve. Until now, though, these have been DIY solutions. In fact, you can see our own DIY Syrp Genie cable cam here. Today, though, Syrp have released their official cablecam, the Slingshot.

DIY your old train set into a motion control timelapse dolly

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This is one of those unique repurposing projects that would have never occurred to me. Having never owned a train set in my life, why would it? I didn’t even know they came in such scales that would be capable of shifting a DSLR. It did, however, occur to the folks at Granite Bay Software, creators of GBTimelapse.

In this video, we see how the “Loco Moco” system works. A laptop running GBTimelapse powers the whole thing. Signals get sent out through a USB interface to the train and camera. This controls when the train moves, and when the camera takes its shots.

This is how they shot the amazing super slow motion burger drop

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Food can be a difficult subject to photograph. There’s all kinds of things to take into account about the colour and texture of the food. You’ve got to make it look appetising to the camera, even if it doesn’t always look that way in real life. Shooting a single frame is difficult enough. So, imagine adding computer controlled knives, robot arm and a slow motion camera into the mix.

Then imagine dropping all the components of your meal from various heights and having them land perfectly. All this, while trying to keep it looking appetising throughout. Well, that’s exactly what director and visual engineer Steve Giralt did in his Deconstructed Burger Concept video.

We are giving away the best time lapse system ever – the Genie Pan Track Kit

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Update: this giveaway has ended, please jump to the bottom to see the winner. Huge thanks to SYRP for the prizes. 

If you are reading this site for any amount of time, you you know that we are big fans of adding movement to time lapses. And while there are some small and nifty devices out there, nothing beats a full rig. And the Genie Pan Track Kit is one of our favorite. Guess what? We’re giving one away! (street value $1,365.00 USD).

The kit is made up from four parts (and you can use them combined or individually): a Genie, a Magic Carpet Short Track, a Genie Mini, and a SYRP ballhead.

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