By Xinyi Li, Yiling Wang, EDITOR

Huang Anpeng and his team members are devoted to time-lapse video. The Big Chongqing, they promoted recently, adopts this shooting method and is in the first series of “Downtown Chapter”. The completed film only lasts 4 minutes and 45 seconds, which is not so popular on the Internet. However, the 8-member team named “Moka” has spent five years in making it.

Provoked to make this film

The team makes visual images for cities in Sichuan, Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Sinkiang for profits. In addition, they also work for public interests and ask for no pay. For example, this Big Chongqing is a time-lapse video presenting the picturesque sceneries in their hometown. And at the very beginning, they just felt provoked to make it.

The downtown in the cloud

Working in the visual image field, Huang Anpeng met Zhao Xin and others, sharing similar ideas, before and after 2007. Since then, they started to try time-lapse video and created several artworks. In 2014, some achievements had won a little reputation. Among them, Chongqing Timelapse has attracted a lot of people on some video websites.

The downtown Chongqing under the sunset

Facing the challenges from some people, the team decided to make a more imposing and completed time-lapse video about Chongqing. “We have shown perfect images of other cities to the audience. If we fail, how can we make Chongqing stand out from others?”

The night skyline of the downtown Chongqing

Five years in photo shooting

To realize this target, they had never known the time-lapse video would cost five years.

From 2014 to 2018, the team took five years to take 600,000 RAW photos of high quality. And they eventually form about 1,200 time-lapse photos. Then, the team spent ten months in the post-processing about the RAW sequence time.

Yuzhong District in Chongqing

The consumed time is considerable, but it is far from revealing the painstaking work for shooting in real life. For one perfect image, the team had to shoot the same place again and again. Li Hua said, “It will be perfect if we can have a satisfactory material in one practice. Otherwise, we will try again the next day. What’s worse, if the weather, light, and other conditions changed, we needed to wait, even until the next summer.”

The snow viewing of Chongqing

Chongqing skyline with multiple layers is an indispensable element for Big Chongqing. However, the towering skyscrapers are “higher” as the city has added some new. The team has to upgrade the materials from 2014 to 2018 even at the same camera stand.

The downtown with lightning thunder

Source: Chongqing Evening News