ORBIT – A Journey Around Earth in Real Time [4k]

Meditate on the beauty of our home.

From Seán Doran:

Orbit is a real time reconstruction of time lapse photography taken on board the International Space Station by NASA’s Earth Science & Remote Sensing Unit.

The structure of the film is built around a nested selection of Phaeleh’s last three albums; Lost Time, Illusion of the Tale & Somnus. The tone & pacing of each track influenced the choice of material used.

Typically each time lapse sequence was photographed at 1 frame per second.

Each sequence was processed in Photoshop. A dirtmap was made in order to repair dust, blemishes and hot pixel artifacts that would otherwise confuse the re-timing phase of the workflow resulting in strobes and distracting blurs.

Image processing techniques were used to emphasize features on the Earth’s surface. Every sequence consists of a number of layers that when masked, processed & blended correctly produce the final look of each shot.

To make sure each sequence was recreated faithfully to the actual rate of speed observed I referenced time-stamps on the first and last frame in the sequence and used frame interpolation software to produce the other 59 frames.

The length of the film is exactly the length of time it takes ISS to orbit the Earth once, 92 minutes & 39 seconds.

[Seán Doran | Via Korben]