Tilt Shift Photography and Time Lapse and WHAT IS ANIMATION?!

Tilt Shift Photography and Time Lapse and WHAT IS ANIMATION?!

Watching real-life people appear as if they are toys is so much fun! The miniaturization effect of a Tilt-Shift Lens is one of the coolest things. It's a weird distortion of stop-motion animation in that it is making the living appear as if they are not living brought to life. I was really taken by the look of these broad, fabulous, landscapes modified to look as if they were tiny sets. I've taken to going online and looking up different tilt-shift lens time lapse videos. Besides the video we watched in class, the most famous example I can think of is the original intro for the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. When the show first aired I thought that the intro was created using computer-generated animations of New York City. It wasn't until a few episodes in when Colbert mentioned the director of the intro, how he watched as Fernando Livschitz hung out of helicopters to get the perfect shot. It's not just the distorted focal plane that makes the city appear miniature, it also requires a telephoto lens that is long distances away from its subject. But is it an animation? Or is it cinematography that resembles the appearance of animation. It's probably both.

I think a time lapse always begs the question... is that really "animation"? A time lapse has the ability to bring to life something in a way it wouldn't have been in a live action version of that image. For instance, a city coming to life as if it were a breathing organism or the trees coming to life with flowers. This, at least for my definition of animation, makes it animation. But is this video (linked below) animation? These are shots of live-action cars, but they have been layered in a way that makes them really visually interesting and uncanny. This is not the way that cars behave and we know that from our real-world experiences. But they look like real cars. My brain immediately went to, "oh this might be a choreographed stunt". But the longer it went on the more I realized that would be absolutely impossible. Is this animation? At what point does manipulation of an image go from live action to animation? Maybe there is more of a grey area to animation then I originally anticipated before this semester started because something is telling me this video is animated.