Remember when timelapses first started hitting the internet? Simple sunsets over the word's greatest cities were enough to enthrall. This over-the-top time lapse of Dubai is a perfect reflection of its very subject: opulent, excessive, awe-inducing.
Just watch this three-minute tour-de-force by timelapse professional Rob Whitworth. The amount of production, effort, and indeed, time involved is staggering.
After I watched it, the momentary euphoria of color and motion wore off and I was left feeling slightly icky. The timelapse, what was once a folk-obession of the digital age—a wondrous, if formulaic, expression of beauty through technology—has become a production of grand scale. The timelapse has evolved like every other trend and trope in visual culture. From tilt-shift to hyperlapse, it has spawned conventions and professional practitioners, arriving finally with demonstrations of excess like we see in Dubai Flow Motion.
Now excuse me while I go watch it again. [via Petapixel]