Home / Photography / Cityscape Photography

Day and Night Merge in Spectacular Timelapse of New York City

By Jessica Stewart on November 25, 2017

Ex-rocket scientist turned filmmaker Julian Tryba of Alinia Media is back with a new timelapse that combines math and art with stunning results. His NYC Layer-Lapse is a two-and-a-half-minute audiovisual symphony that shows us the iconic cityscape from a new dimension, as day and night are blended seamlessly together.

Tryba used his background in engineering to write code and create what he calls a layer-lapse. “In the spirit of Einstein's relativity theory, layer-lapses assign distinct clocks to any number of objects or regions in a scene,” Tryba writes. “Each of these clocks may start at any point in time, and tick at any rate. The result is a visual time dilation effect known as layer-lapse.”

Each scene has 100 to 300 layers, with a unique equation assigned to every building. This equation helps decide at what time of day to show the architecture. Adding to the fun, audio triggers in the song set off changes, making the scene seemingly move to the beat of the soundtrack. Tryba is still perfecting the process and hopes in the future it can be used in physical or virtual art installations.

So just what is the breakdown in order to capture enough footage of New York to pull together the project? Tryba took 22 trips to New York for 352 hours of filming and over 200,000 photographs captured. That added up to almost 10,000 miles driven and $1,430 in parking fees to create the coolest view of New York we've seen in awhile.