Filmmaker Matthew Maniego spent the past three years shooting Paradise II, a spectacular time-lapse video shot in San Francisco. The film is a sequel to a similar time-lapse Maniego released in 2013, but this is the first to be rendered in 4K. It was shot with both the Canon EOS 5D Mark III and Sony A7S II.
Maniego’s equipment list included just the two camera bodies and three lenses in total – by no means a large amount of gear for a three-year shoot. But where he splurged was with his motion-control setup, which included a Dynamic Perception Stage One motorized slider and a Emotibo TB3 3-axis robotic mount. The resulting footage is simply beautiful, including a shot of rolling fog that looks like ocean waves crashing over the forest. Some of the footage was even licensed to be used in the Super Bowl, according to DIY Photography.
For people unfamiliar with San Francisco, Paradise II does a great job of presenting the city in an unexpected way. While iconic locations are featured, such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Lombard Street, most of the film is about the surrounding natural landscape. In fact, the city itself remains blanketed by fog for a good portion of the film.
Over 100,000 individual frames were captured for the project, though only a fraction of those would make the final cut. Maniego spent six weeks in post production. He used the LRTimelapse 4 plugin for Adobe Lightroom, VSCO film presets for coloring, and made the final edit in Adobe Premiere.
Anyone who has made a time-lapse film before knows how time-consuming the process is, but Maniego’s effort is particularly impressive. Three years of shooting and six weeks of editing culminated in a finished video that’s over in less than two-and-a-half minutes.