LEGO Timelapse sled

In the post about my [Porsche Assembly Timelapse]((% post_url 2017-11-20-porsche-timelapse-assembly.md %}), I didn’t mention one of my favorite parts of that shoot: building a sled which moved my camera very slowly, allowing the panning in the end video.

The resulting video

One of the challenges was to make sure that the sled moved enough; it had to move maybe three feet in roughly half an hour. I’m sure there’s commercial stuff I could get for this, but I figured I could make something using Lego.

And, at the end of the day, I was right!

The final sled with camera

I modeled the sled around the Mindstorms NXT brain which I had laying around and one of the large motors for easy torque. Since I had to reduce the speed a lot, I figured I should use something with more torque to get through all the gear reductions.

Bottom view of the sled

As you can see, there’s a bunch of gears there, just making the drive shaft move slower and slower. At the end of it, you can barely see the wheels turning despite the motor moving at a decent clip.

See how slow it goes?

After I got the gearing and everything working, I built up a cradle for the camera, just slapping pieces together until the camera would sit at the correct angle for quite some time.

Side view of finished sled

To do the shooting, I didn’t do anything glamorous; just set up a plank of wood between a couple of chairs, hooked up the NXT to AC power so it could last, set up some lights, put the sled on one end and pressed go.

Shooting setup

Fun fact: the pauses in the middle of the video were unintentional; the sled got caught a couple of times and I didn’t notice (I mean, the sled basically looked like it was stopped all the time) and I wasn’t going to disassemble the Porsche just to reshoot, so I added some smoothing in post and it worked out pretty well!

Any rate, I had a lot of fun putting this together, and I hope that you enjoy it too!