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Carc Central Community => Reviews & Session Reports => Topic started by: danisthirty on August 19, 2013, 02:30:20 AM

Title: Winter Edition Time Lapse
Post by: danisthirty on August 19, 2013, 02:30:20 AM
I know that a lot of people have done some very good Carcassonne time lapses in the past but I was keen to do one of my own as I love playing Carcassonne and am also very keen on time lapse and stop-motion animations. For this reason, I'm very proud to bring you this time lapse video of two recent games of Carcassonne Winter Edition:

"A Night in on the Tiles": http://youtu.be/sKQ2pgKcxVc (http://youtu.be/sKQ2pgKcxVc)

The photos were taken on my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S2) using a free Android app called "Tina Timelapse". Rather than fork out for a proper tripod I built a cradle to hold my phone out of my daughter's Duplo and then fixed this atop another little table using Blu Tack! Not a very high-tech solution but it was cheap and effective so I was happy. I set the app to take a picture every 8 seconds and then enjoyed myself while the phone did its stuff...

My wife (playing with the princess meeples) won the first game by 35 points after some surprisingly ruthless but equally effective measures to prevent my zombies benefitting from two cities worth 20 to 30 points each. When the second game started to go the same way I became much more aggressive and made the most of an early opportunity to trap five princesses with one tile! Needless to say I won the game by quite a wide margin after this but I can't say how wide the margin was as we didn't calculate our final scores and had an argument instead (also included in the video).

After the games I transferred all of the images from phone to laptop and used Windows Movie Maker to turn them into a video. I experimented with different frame rates but found that displaying each image for 0.35 seconds seemed to work well. This ratio meant that both 30-minute games could be condensed into just under a minute and a half of video each and this felt about right to me.

I hope you enjoy it! If you have any feedback/ comments/ suggestions/ improvements/ ideas then I'd be very happy to hear them as I'm sure this is something that I'm going to be repeating again soon.
Title: Re: Winter Edition Time Lapse
Post by: Paul on August 19, 2013, 05:33:23 AM
 ^-^

I should invest in the Winter Edition. Somehow it looks more beautiful than the regular green grass version. Rather cozy, just like Christmas!  ;D

And of course, a great video you uploaded. Hopefully it spurs me to do one some day as well!
Title: Re: Winter Edition Time Lapse
Post by: danisthirty on August 19, 2013, 05:56:07 AM
I would definitely recommend it! The artwork on the tiles looks better for one thing, but there are also 84 tiles rather than 72. The configuration of features on the 12 extra tiles isn't anything you can't get elsewhere but there are certain tiles that can get you out of situations where you'd be completely trapped in the basic game!

I think that Z-Man are due to release this in the autumn and this should include the Gingerbread Man expansion too, so I'd wait until then before getting hold of it if you can.
Title: Re: Winter Edition Time Lapse
Post by: AlbinoAsian on August 19, 2013, 07:20:32 AM
Beautiful stuff! Thanks for sharing that.
Title: Re: Winter Edition Time Lapse
Post by: CKorfmann on August 19, 2013, 10:37:53 AM
Well done.  Merit for you.   :(y)
Title: Re: Winter Edition Time Lapse
Post by: Carcking on August 21, 2013, 05:55:42 PM
Excellent danisthirty! And nice CarcC plug at the end!! Merit just for that!