A Taste of Austria: FilmSpektakel’s Two-Year Time-Lapse Film of the Alps

How do you fit a whole country into less than three minutes? For the Vienna filmmakers of FilmSpektakel, the answer was two years on the road, about 600 time-lapse clips and roughly 5 terabytes of raw footage. A Taste of Austria, released in March 2015, races from mountain lakes and Alpine peaks to city streets, and it became a Vimeo Staff Pick.

FilmSpektakel and the making of the film

FilmSpektakel was founded by Peter Jablonowski, who leads production, and Thomas Pöcksteiner, who handles post-production. The company is based in Vienna and specialises in time-lapse and hyperlapse. Introducing the film, Pöcksteiner described Austria’s scenery and culture as hard to match, and invited viewers to feel the atmosphere of its cities and landscapes.

They shot A Taste of Austria between 2013 and 2015 across the country. The kit list reads like a time-lapse workshop: Canon 5D Mark III, 6D and 600D bodies, Samyang 14 mm wide-angles, Canon and Tamron zooms up to a 150–600 mm telephoto, a Dynamic Perception Stage One slider, a Pocketslider and an eMotimo TB3 motion-control head. The finished montage runs just under three minutes and mixes time-lapse, hyperlapse and astrolapse, the night-sky version of the technique. Time Lapse Network named it among the best time-lapse films of 2015.

Time-lapse, hyperlapse and astrolapse explained

A time-lapse records a frame every few seconds from a fixed position, so clouds boil over a ridge and light sweeps across a valley in seconds. A hyperlapse also moves the camera between frames, so the viewer seems to travel through a street or around a building. An astrolapse points the camera at the night sky, turning the slow wheel of the stars into visible motion.

Motorised sliders and pan-tilt heads like the ones FilmSpektakel used let the camera creep a few millimetres between exposures, which is how the film gets its smooth, gliding moves through the landscape.

The voice of Felix Baumgartner

The voice-over comes from original audio of Felix Baumgartner’s Red Bull Stratos mission, a fitting choice for a film about Austria. On 14 October 2012 the Austrian skydiver rode a helium balloon for about two and a half hours to almost 39 kilometres above Roswell, New Mexico, then jumped.

He fell freely for about 4 minutes 19 seconds and reached Mach 1.25, around 1,358 km/h, becoming the first person to break the sound barrier without engine power. The mission set records for the highest manned balloon flight and highest jump, beating the mark Joseph Kittinger had set in 1960. Kittinger, his mentor, spoke to him from mission control.

Austria in numbers: Alps, lakes and the Danube

The film’s mountains are no exaggeration. The Alps cover about 62 per cent of Austria’s 83,871 square kilometres, and the highest peak, the Grossglockner, rises to 3,797 metres. The Danube, the country’s longest river, flows past Vienna on its 2,857-kilometre journey to the Black Sea, and Austria shares Lake Constance, the Bodensee, with Germany and Switzerland. The country is divided into nine federal states, from Vorarlberg in the west to Vienna and Burgenland in the east.

For a closer look at one Austrian setting, explore Innsbruck and its mountain backdrop. For a photographic project built around nights in the mountains, see Karol Nienartowicz’s mountain tents. FilmSpektakel also posts new work on Facebook and Twitter.

Related reading:

• Hallstatt – Idyllic Village of Plenty of Fun Activities, Austria
• Schlegeis Reservoir: Mountain Views and Alpine Engineering
• The Barn in Going am Wilden Kaiser: Timber, Concrete and Alpine Views
• Arlberg, Austria: Skiing Heritage and Alpine Village Landscapes

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