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Tech

Hyperlapse Is the TL;DR of Video

It's Vine on Adderall. No fat, all meat.
Image: Shutterstock

You've seen them streaking across your feeds. Catch one, and suddenly you're in hyperdrive. You're whipping over great distances, seemingly in fast forward. You're bopping from Tokyo to San Francisco in 83 seconds.

You're watching hyperlapses—first-person time lapses that have been algorithmically stabilized. Many have likely been shot with Instagram's newish app, fittingly called Hyperlapse, that lets you create and share your own high-definition panoramic movies. They're all over the place. The White House even made one.

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Hyperlapse, by which I mean both Hyperlapse and hyperlapse, is sweeping into the cultural subconscious as fast as the videos themselves move. It would seem there are two obvious reasons why this is; we've been compressing time and space for nearly as long as we've been recording moving images, and an app like Hyperlapse, with an image-stabilization algorithm that keys the gyroscope in your phone to capture extended steady shots, makes it that much easier to play with the arrows of spacetime. But perhaps it goes deeper than that.

What are we talking about when we talk about hyperlapses? The fastest way of getting to the point. Who has time anymore for anything but the essential nutrients? Just give us the gist, already. Give us the one-liner, the takeaway. Give us what we need to know about a thing, a place, a process, and nothing more. No appetizers, no fat, just the meat. Think of it this way: Hyperlapse is the tl;dr of video.

That's "too long; didn't read" in internet speak. You see it all over Reddit, often at the very bottom of posts or lengthy comments on the sprawling social sharing site. It's a summary, more or less—a 2,000-word treatise on labor is distilled to a sentence-long elevator pitch—and nothing if not the author placating a majority of readers who, at the end of the day, just want the essential nutrients. tl;dr, they implore. tl;dr!

That's what's makes the hyperlapse boom, inextricably bound as it is to the rise of Hyperlapse, such a profound, if inevitable, pivot in the way we choose to engage with, and position ourselves within our worlds.

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We're seeing the same driving force behind tl;dr making the leap from text to video; a full bike ride through Melbourne, normally a day-long trek, boils down to 90 seconds. Because really, who even has time to wade through hours of "real-time" riding footage through Melbourne? tl;dw, too long, didn't watch.

Bikerlapse - Instagram Hyperlapse on a bike. Video: Nathan Kaso.

Hyperlapse (both the craft and the app) makes circumventing the bullshit a breeze. But don't call it timelapse.

Geoff Tompkinson has been making hyperlapses for the past two years. According to Tompkinson's blog, with a timelapse "the action in a scene is speeded-up and the camera is either static or moving very short distances." And as our sister site The Creators Project adds, "'short distances' means a steady pan or tilt is allowed—maybe even a brief dolly—but these movements are under the control of a motorized rig, usually only capable of subtle movements."

A hyperlapse, by contrast, is far less constrained. Per Tompkinson:

It enables the camera to be moved over considerable distances. This movement can occur across relatively uneven terrain, can pass without disturbance through crowded situations, and allows for fully controlled complex motion paths and camera angle changes.

In other words, hyperlapse can cover a lot more ground and net a whole lot more information than, say, timelapse, but it also gets to the point (tl;dr) quicker and smoother.

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This is Hyperlapse by Geoff Tompkinson.

It's sort of the perfect name then, Hyperlapse. We're a fast-shifting bunch (hyper) with a short attention span (lapse). Really, it was only a matter of time before Instagram went live with the app. It's Vine on speed.

Naturally, Hyperlapse has spun a good deal of the clickbait and tech-blogger set on its head. Buzzfeed called the above Hyperlapse'd Melbourne ride "insane." The New York Times' Jenna Wortham wrote that Hyperlapse represents an "exciting" Instagrammable pivot from mere yearbook-style static images, with early Hyperlapse adopters "exploring the passage of time and what it means to be alive in a particular moment, rather than just try to capture it and put a filter on it." Matt McFarland of the Washington Post went ahead and called Hyperlapse the "best app of 2014."

Who's to say they're wrong? You'll probably never go to North Korea, but hyperlapse can jet you in and around Pyongyang. And that is pretty neat, right? Isn't that a good thing?

Thing is, it can be hard to snap out of hyperlapse once you've stepped into its hyperdriven stream. It is an alluring stream, full of color and, seemingly, the entire world. What's not to like? It gets you to the point. But if the point is also to strip away every last forgettable moment of the ride, maybe there's something to slowing down. Or at the least, going steady.