Time Lapse Filming Services

There’s something fascinating about watching buildings appear out of the ground before your eyes in a matter of minutes. So whether it’s capturing an entire construction project from start to finish, capturing the interior fit-out of an office, or capturing a corporate event like an exhibition from set-up to break-down, our state-of-the-art time-lapse cameras will deliver beautiful panoramic imagery of your projects — long or short, indoors or out.

Long-term time-lapse filming has been around for many years, and it’s found applications across a huge range of industries from construction to events, and even to the long-term documentation of climate change. Recent advances in camera technology have made time-lapse cameras smaller, lighter and more energy efficient, and Horizon Imaging are proud to start offering a time-lapse filming service with a unique and highly-capable time-lapse camera system which produces imagery that lives up to the high standards our clients have come to expect from us.

Do you want some truly eye-catching footage showing your construction project emerging out of the ground?
Would you like to showcase a particularly visual service you offer that happens too slowly to be appreciable with normal video?
Maybe you'd like to capture the setup and break-down of equipment and furniture at an event venue ?
Or perhaps you want to document how flora, fauna or landscapes change with the passing weeks, months or years ?

Whatever your requirements, we’re here to help! Click the button to access our contact form where you can submit details of your requirements – We’ll be in touch soon!

What Makes Us Different?

There are an increasing number of time-lapse filming providers available to work with these days, but we believe none of them have the same combination of skills, background in traditional photography and dedication to customer satisfaction as we do at Horizon Imaging.

We’re very proud of our history and the journey we’ve been on – here are just some of the points we feel set us apart from other time-lapse filming service providers:

We have over 15 years of experience in providing promotional imagery to the commercial property sector, so we know how to take imagery that has presence and impact. We bring this experience to our use of time-lapse cameras too.
We use unique dual-lens time-lapse cameras, which provide a >180° field of view of your projects, giving much greater flexibility in where the cameras can be mounted.
With a background in engineering (including designing our own drones in the late 2000s), we relish the challenge of designing bespoke installation hardware to mount our cameras where you need them to be mounted.
We have 200+ glowing testimonials from our valued clients – a testament to our dedication to customer satisfaction.

Read on to learn more about the features of our time-lapse filming service

Ultra-Wide, Panoramic Field-of-View

The immersive 220° field-of-view of the Horizon Imaging Time-Lapse camera compared to the typical field-of-view of a traditional time-lapse camera. Click to enlarge.

Most time-lapse cameras have a relatively restricted field of view, either because they used a fixed focal-length lens that isn’t very wide, or it’s physically not possible to use a lens wide enough to capture the whole of a site in a single image.

As a result, this means traditional time-lapse cameras either have to be mounted relatively far away from the site (if the client wants to have the whole site in the frame) — something that isn’t always possible in very built-up environments — or the client has to make do with time-lapse imagery that only captures a small portion of the site, as the red outline in the graphic above illustrates.

To solve this problem, Horizon Imaging have invested in state-of-the-art time-lapse camera systems that feature two separate cameras in the same enclosure, capturing an enormous 220° panoramic field-of-view. This means that even if space is tight you can simply mount the camera on the perimeter of the site, and it will capture everything that happens within the site’s boundary.

This opens up a huge range of creative opportunities for mounting time-lapse cameras right in the heart of construction projects, capturing unique, immersive imagery from a wide variety of angles for the duration of the project.

Compact Form Factor, Excellent Image Quality

The Horizon Imaging Time-Lapse camera system installed on construction sites in Kent and Essex, showcasing three different ways of mounting the camera — to a weighted tripod on top of a site cabin, screwed to the wall of a nearby building and clamped to an existing scaffolding structure (the third photo also shows an additional battery backup system that will allow the camera to run on battery power alone for a year). Fun fact: the camera in the third image can be seen in the second image (it’s circled in red)! Click to enlarge.

Usually there has been a trade-off between quality and size with traditional time-lapse cameras. If you wanted good quality imagery the cameras had to be large (and often housed in even larger, bulky housings). Similarly, if you wanted the cameras to be compact they would have poor image quality. But now technology has evolved to the point where you can have both excellent image quality and a compact form factor at the same time.

The Horizon Imaging Time-Lapse system is about the size of a large paperback book … and that’s it! Everything is included in the one neat package, including the two cameras, a large internal battery and a solar panel to keep the battery charged.

Being so lightweight and compact means it’s very easy to mount the camera to existing infrastructure, scaffolding poles, tripods, trees — you name it, we can probably fit our cameras to it!

Built-In Solar Panel for Mains-Free Operation

The Horizon Imaging Time-Lapse camera system installed on three sites in West Sussex and Hampshire — sites where mains power simply wasn’t an option. The built-in solar panel can keep the camera’s battery charged even on short, overcast, winter days. Click to enlarge.

Using solar power for enabling off-grid operation of time-lapse cameras is nothing new, but often it will be a chargeable optional extra as the size of solar-panel required to power a traditional time-lapse camera system has tended to be very large and cumbersome, and hence would require additional time to install separately to the camera.

With the Horizon Imaging Time-Lapse system, the solar-panel is attached directly to the camera, and can be pointed independently of the camera to ensure it collects as much solar energy as possible.

Even through the darkest of British winters the solar panel will keep the internal battery topped up!

If the time-lapse camera needs to be used indoors where there is no sunlight, the built-in battery can keep the camera powered for around 6 months, and with an external battery this can be significantly extended. The camera can also be configured to be mains powered if it is available.

Remote Access to Live Imagery

The online cloud-based portal that all our Time-Lapse filming clients have access to. The panel on the left is an up-to-date time-lapse video comprised of all the imagery taken so far, and the panel on the right is an image browser where you can scroll through and see all the images taken so far in chronological order. Click to enlarge

Most commercial time-lapse providers will use systems that allow you to remotely view the latest imagery that’s been captured by the time-lapse camera, either using WiFi or the mobile network. However, there are some providers that use very low-cost time-lapse cameras which only record to a memory card and so neither you or the provider will know if the camera is still functioning without physically visting the site to download and check the files from the camera’s memory card.

These systems should be avoided at all costs as certainly for construction projects (which only happen once!), there are no second chances if batteries run flat, memory cards run out of space or cameras get dislodged without you knowing!

The Horizon Imaging Time-Lapse system provides real-time access to the latest images taken by the cameras via a dedicated cloud-based platform which anyone can access if provided with the correct link. The latest imagery is uploaded directly to the cloud platform via either WiFi (if available on site) or the 4G mobile network.

As part of our standard service, we check the image feed from the cameras on your site on a daily basis to make sure everything is functioning correctly and that the cameras haven’t been moved or dislodged.

Frequently Asked Questions – Time Lapse Filming Services

We get asked numerous questions about time-lapse filming. So to save you asking, here are our most frequently asked questions about our Time Lapse Filming Services. Click on a question to reveal the answer.

1. How large is the time-lapse camera?

The time-lapse camera we use is approximately 19cm x 19cm x 7cm with the solar panel closed and weighs approximately 1kg.

2. Is the camera waterproof?

Yes. The camera is fully waterproof and is designed to work outdoors in the harshest of conditions.

3. Does the camera need a power supply?

The camera has a built-in solar panel which can keep the camera charged indefinitely, even through the middle of winter, provided it has a clear view of the southern sky.

If the sky is partially obstructed (by buildings or tree cover), there is a chance the solar panel might not be able to keep the camera charged. If this were to happen, we can connect temporary backup batteries to keep it running until there is sufficient sunshine to keep the battery charged.

If there is no sunshine available, for example if the camera is to be installed on the north face of a building that never gets sunshine, or if the camera is to be installed inside, then either a bank of batteries can be installed next to the camera to keep it powered for several months at a time, or the camera can be connected to a mains to USB power supply which will keep it powered indefinitely.

4. Can you remotely access the camera to see what it is recording and to change the recording parameters?

Yes, the camera can connect either via the mobile phone network or WiFi to upload the images it’s taking to a secure online portal.

This portal also allows the camera’s recording parameters to be changed remotely, including the interval between the images, and when the camera is to start and stop capturing images each day.

5. Can images and videos be downloaded remotely?

Yes, the online portal (see the section above entitled “Remote Access to Live Imagery”) gives us and our clients 24/7 access to all the imagery captured by the camera. Both individual images and videos from any date or period of dates can easily be downloaded from anywhere in the world.

6. What field-of-view can the camera can capture?

The time-lapse camera actually contains two independent camera modules aligned at 90° to each other, each with lens that has a field-of-view of approximately 100°.

Depending on the size of the site to be captured, and how close the camera is mounted to the site, either one or both lenses can be used, capturing either a 100° or 220° field-of-view.

If the 220° field-of-view is required, the online portal automatically stitches the two images together into a single, seamless, ultra-wide-angle image.

7. What is the resolution of the images captured by the camera?

Each camera module captures images that are approximately 4K in resolution (along the horizontal edge of the image). If both camera modules are used (see the answer to point 5 above), then the resulting stitched image will have a resolution of approximately 7K.

What Do Our Clients Say?

If you haven’t used a Time Lapse Filming company before, you’re in safe hands with Horizon Imaging. We have a track record of exceeding our clients’ expectations and providing excellent customer service from start to finish.

You can read feedback from some of our roof inspection clients below, or you can browse through all 200+ of our glowing testimonials from across all our services on our dedicated Testimonials page.

TIP! Refresh the page to see three different testimonials!

“Horizon Imaging provided video, drone and still photography for our website and marketing campaigns. David understood our requirements and produced excellent imagery. We have no hesitation recommending Horizon Imaging for their excellent and professional service.”

The Bourne Club

“Willmott Dixon approached Horizon Imaging as a reliable partner on our supply chain to capture a full time-lapse film of the new Horsham Fire Station project. The fire station is one of the first major projects procured by West Sussex County Council (WSCC) in many years and having the ability to capture the full site journey was very important to WSCC and ourselves. The resulting video is amazing and fitted the brief perfectly. Thank you to David and the team for all your efforts. We look forward to working with you again on the next scheme!”

Willmott Dixon

“We thought it would be good to commission a time-lapse video which shows the hard work that goes into one of our latest geotechnical projects and Horizon Imaging did a great job capturing this video for us! This is the second time we’ve used Horizon Imaging – the first being taking aerial progress photos of a landslip repair project. David has always understood the requirements of the work and has been very helpful and flexible in selecting the optimum times and positions to capture the imagery. We look forward to working with Horizon Imaging again in the future.”

Campbell Reith

Time-Lapse Filming Sample Imagery

Want to see some more examples of our Time-Lapse Filming work? Click on any of the images below to visit our Time-Lapse Filming Gallery:

Please feel free to get in touch with us, we'd be delighted to chat through your requirements with you!

Call us today on

01483 610 535 or 07792 139 506

Drop us an email on:

david@horizonimaging.co.uk

Or complete the form on the right and we will be in touch within 1-2 working days.

Thank you for your time and we look forward to hearing from you!

Please feel free to get in touch with us, we’d be delighted to chat through your requirements with you!

Call us today on:

01483 610 535 or 07792 139 506

Or drop us an email on:

david@horizonimaging.co.uk

Or complete the form below and we will be in touch within 1-2 working days.

Thank you for your time and we look forward to hearing from you!