Nightfall: New LA time lapse from Colin Rich

Artist Colin Rich, who made a pretty stunning timelapse piece on Los Angeles at night last year, returns to the subject of illuminated LA. The music this time is "Echoes of Mine" by M83.

He explains on Vimeo:

'Nightfall' is a three minute tour of light through the City of Angels.

I shot "Nightfall" in an attempt to capture Los Angeles as it transitioned from day to night. As you probably know, LA is an expansive city so shooting it from many different angles was critical. Usually I was able to capture just one shot per day with a lot of driving, exploring, and scouting in between but the times sitting in traffic or a "sketchy" neighborhood often lead to new adventures and interesting places.

Nightfall in particular is my favorite time to shoot time lapse. Capturing the transition from day to night while looking back at the city as the purple shadow of Earth envelopes the eastern skyline and the warm distant twinkling halogen lights spark to life and give the fading sun a run for her money- this will never grow old or boring to me.

In this piece, it was important to me for the shots to both capture and accentuate the movement of light through the day and night and the use of multiple motion control techniques allowed me to do so.

The LA Times' Sam Allen, who profiled Rich earlier this year, gives some of the stats:

To capture new angles of Downtown, Rich shot from the 6th Street Bridge, scaled fire escapes on apartment buildings and booked a special room at the top of the Bonaventure Hotel. He said this film incorporates a much larger number of individual time-lapses — 96 total — which are strung together to form the 3-minute, 18-second film....

But “Nightfall” also includes vantage points far from the city’s center, like Mount Wilson and Mount Hollywood. The climax of the film, Rich said, shows the glow of Los Angeles from Deer Creek Canyon Park in Malibu.