Watch this 26 minute time-lapse video of our 16 months roof renovation project made from 389172 photos

Here is the timelapse video:

The video features…

  • friendly professionals doing high quality work,
  • deconstruction of the old roof tiles and truss,
  • construction of new truss and tiling the roof,
  • building our new flat,
  • sun, moon, stars, clouds, snow, and rain,
  • Ingrid and Leo.

It is intentionally “slow TV”. During the day, the professionals work. At night the stars and the moon and the bushes are. The video has a long pace and duration, as had the renovation. Every shown day features some activity. There is no music, you are invited to play your own background music.

Dedication

Dedykowane Januszowi Pytlowi i Adamowi Kukli, którzy to zbudowali.

Dedicated to Janus Pytel and Adam Kukle, who built it.

Thanks to Ebo Rose for technical advice for the time-lapse.

What you can learn about making time-lapse videos

Read the rest of this blog post to learn how my idea “I could do a time-lapse video of the house renovation!” followed by meticulous work resulted in this video 4 years later.

You will learn about shooting 389172 photos over the course of 518 days with a Canon 600D and assembling them into a video.

The software scripts I programmed are over in my github here:

If you have questions or positive feedback, comment below in this blog post.

Do you want to replicate my approach? I am very happy to help by adding more documentation of what I did.

Needed hardware

  • camera: Canon 600D … or any SLR which can run the Magic Lantern camera software
  • power adapter Canon ACK-E8 for EOS 550D 600D; ASIN : B0037NZ2MI; model number : 4517B006AA; Amazon Link
  • tripod
  • masking tape, paper, pencil
  • computer capable of running the software
  • network drive for storage of 22 gigabyte videos during the project
  • a room with a view on the construction site … the photos were taken from a nearby rented flat we lived in during planning and construction

Needed software

Goal and approach

The goal of this project was to create a time-lapse video documenting the house renovation.

I never did a multi-day time-lapse before. I had a goal and a Canon D-SLR. I wanted to reuse my existing hardware instead of buying new toys. I did shorter time-lapses with a GoPro and multiple amateur videos. My friend Ebo Rose gave me crucial advice from his professional experience on using an SLR and Magic Lantern.

As this was my first and probably last multi-month time-lapse, I approached the project with an open mind to learn and try out different techniques. Decisions were done according to the philosophy “good enough and timely is perfect“. Once a step worked good enough, it was documented and applied repeatedly. I did not automate everything, when I thought it was not worth the time. Priority was on building the roof and renovating the house in high quality. The video documentation was an appreciated side-project. These were once-in-a-lifetime activities, it had to work on first try.

One project after another. Research, learning, and testing the hardware and software was done between April 2020 and May 2021. When construction started in May 2021, the video project was prepared and I could focus on the renovation project. Finishing the flat and house is an ongoing project that will last decades. Time for video-post-production was scarce. Overall this project was finished on TODO, around 4.8 years after it started.

I tried alternative hardware, software, power supplies, camera settings. Here I document what worked at the end to keep it short and easy to read.

After identifying ffmpeg as the best tool to assemble photos to videos and learning that it can also cut, add srt subtitles, and add in-movie titles, I decided that ffmpeg is the only video manipulation tool for this project.

Using a consistent & documented video production pipeline resulted in a consistent look over a production time of four years.

Do this to make your own time-lapse

Follow the documentation here: github.com/leobard/timelapse

It contains:

  • camera setup & settings
  • weekly processing of photos to videos
  • selection process
  • cutting, adding titles, concatenating videos

I encourage you to “fork” my approach and create your own variant.

We are here now

For us, the video is especially beautiful. The need to renovate the house became apparent around 2010. Our vision to build our own flat inside the roof started around 2016. Today it is reality.

These words we write in 2025, being inside the flat you see on the video.

Friends and family and us are watching this video occasionally together. We are sitting in the living room you see in the video. We are watching the room being built “around us”.

The slow pace of the video helps us to reflect on the long and hard work all this had been.

The flat we built is beautiful.

We like it.

We like it a lot.