Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows time-lapse footage of flowers such as roses and native irises of various colours and records the process by which the plants form buds, then flower and finally die. The clip is silent.

Educational value points

• Time-lapse photography can record gradual changes in nature and replay them at a faster rate by using film to compress the actual time taken. For example, an iris may take 2 days to form buds and then flower, whereas in the clip this time is condensed to a matter of seconds.

• While film usually runs at 24 frames per second, with time-lapse photography events are filmed at a slower rate and the footage is then replayed at a normal speed. For example, if the camera is set to expose one frame every minute for 4 h, when that footage is replayed at 24 frames per second the event that took 4 h to occur will be reduced to 10 s of screen time.

• In time-lapse photography the interval between each frame or exposure varies according to the object being filmed. It can range from less than a few seconds for an accelerated sequence showing the movement of clouds to about 3 min for a sequence that shows a plant forming buds and flowering.

• Time-lapse photography has made a valuable contribution to science in that it allows scientists to observe on film over a period of minutes or even seconds changes in objects such as clouds or plants, as well as the life cycles of animals, chemical reactions and the process of decay, that in real time may occur over days or even months.

• In this clip amateur filmmaker E Winton expands on the work of English filmmaker Fred Percy Smith, whose Birth of the Flower (1910) was the first film to use time-lapse photography to show the process of a flower blooming and was hailed for combining science and art. Time-lapse photography was first used by pioneer French filmmaker Georges Méliès in his film Carrefour de L’Opera (1897). Méliès is reputed to have accidentally discovered the technique after his camera jammed while filming on a busy street in Paris.