We’re used to time-lapse photography being merely a feature of our smartphone camera app, but of course it has its origins in film. A movie camera would be triggered frame by frame at fixed intervals, with the result being the timelapse. A dead art, you might wonder, were it not for [Kevin Santo Cappuccio], who is capturing his work in timelapse on 16mm film, with a vintage Bolex camera.
For those of us with a penchant for film the camera alone makes it worth a second look, but the actuation mechanism is at the heart of the project. It uses a slightly unusual but nevertheless strangely ubiquitous actuator, in the form of a car door central locking actuator. This in turn is triggered by an Arduino Nano, and he has the ultimate dream of using a 16mm film timelapse as part of a fully-16mm submission video for the Hackaday prize.
We think it’s a pity that more film-based projects don’t end up on these pages, so we’re very pleased indeed to see this one. If you’re curious about the other side of the 16mm system, well we’ve introduced you to the inner workings of a projector before, too.
Film is projected at a rate of 24 frames per second, which is sufficient to create the POV illusion. A projector’s shutter inserts itself between the lamp and the lens, blocking the light to prevent projection of the film’s physical movement. But these short periods of darkness, or flicker, present a problem. Originally, shutters were made in the shape of a semi-circle, so they block the light half of the time. Someone figured out that increasing the flicker rate to 60-70 times per second would have the effect of constant brightness. And so the modern shutter has three blades: one blocks projection of the film’s movement, and the other two simply increase flicker.
