This is the “world’s first talking timelapse” and how it was made

A YouTuber who goes by the name of Lotrfan, has created what he calls the “world’s first talking timelapse”. While it’s arguably better classified as stop motion, it does also show the passage of time over a 285-day period. There’s been some thought put into this one, and both the concept and final result are pretty cool.

The project began as just a regular video clip, as Lotrfan explains partway through the video above. But then, after shooting a photo every day for over nine months, we end up with the final 9-second video.

The timelapse was created using a pretty basic technique. Despite being quite basic, though, it’s an interesting application of the process and one that takes quite a bit of dedication. The creator first shot a video of himself actually saying the words we hear in the video…

Hi guys, I’ve developed a medical condition which causes my hair to grow extremely fast.

Like and subscribe.

And, for the love of god, please send help. This is excrutiatingly painful!

The source footage was then separated out into individual frames as separate images. Then, using a piece of software that allowed him to overlay the view of his webcam on top of an image, he was able to recreate the position and pose for each frame, including the shape of the mouth for every sound.

When the images are played back at the same speed as the video, it looks like the mouth is moving in real-time in time to the words in the video, although his hair and beard are both growing rapidly throughout.

As I said, it’s a pretty cool concept and a technique I haven’t seen used in quite this way before.