FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Entertainment

Swooping Seagull Flight Paths Revealed in Time-Blended Video

Paul Parker uses After Effects to turn the flight paths of seagulls in his hometown into stunning abstract trails.

Filmmaker Paul Parker has released a followup to his trippy and Hitchcockian video of time-lapsed birds in flight An Hour of Birds All At Once. The sequel, Seagull Skytrails, features scores of seagulls cruising on the winds coming off the sea at St. Ives, Cornwall, UK.

Like the previous video, which featured an hour of bird flight condensed into a minute of footage, this video was created using the echo effect in After Effects—a time blending technique that merges the birds' trails to reveal "helix patterns & curves in the flight paths of seagulls." But unlike that previous video, this one is much longer and without the slowed-down, distorted remix of of Donna Summer’s "I Feel Love," which makes it far less ominous, although it still retains a foreboding quality.

Advertisement

The video shows footage shot at different locations across the tourism town of St. Ives, displaying the mesmerizing movements and patterns of the birds as they arc across the sky. Then, about halfway through, the flight becomes abstract, as the birds merge to become long trails that skim across the sky.

Related:

Terrifying Video Composites Hundreds Of Birds Into A Single Blue Sky

Animated Portraits Imagine Birds Of A Parallel Universe

Stunning Layered Photos Capture The Passage Of Time In A Single Frame

How One Filmmaker Engineered A New Take On The Timelapse