Building Construction.5

Actual Elapsed Time: 8 months (21,000,000 seconds)

A new building emerges from an empty lot. First, the construction crew must dig out tons of dirt to make room for the building's foundation. If you look closely at the right side of the image at the beginning of the video, you can actually see how the hole gets deeper. With the foundation in place, the crew then sets about building the steel framework for the building. Working one floor at a time, they erect four floors in just over a month.

How This Clip Was Made:

This time-lapse video was created using a special time-lapse video recorder that takes one frame of video every eight seconds. One image from each day was digitized and transferred to the computer. When the transferred frames are displayed in order, the action is shown at more than 1,000,000 times normal speed. Production: David Scwabbe, San Francisco Public Library. Post-Production: Jeff Fohl.

Related Clips:

Building Construction.1 - Actual Elapsed Time: 17 minutes (1,000 seconds)

Building Construction.2 - Actual Elapsed Time: 2.8 hours (10,000 seconds)

Building Construction.3 - Actual Elapsed Time: 14 hours (50,400 seconds)

Building Construction.4 - Actual Elapsed Time: 20 days (1,730,000 seconds)