Austin After Dark [Watch]

By Rose Cahalan in Videos on March 23, 2015 at 2:00 pm | 20 Comments

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Andrew Takano does his best work when everyone else is sleeping. At 4 a.m., he’ll head to the Capitol grounds or the UT campus, set up his video camera, and wait. Takano, BS ’07, MS ’10, films time-lapse videos of Austin—high-contrast, stylized city tours in which an entire night’s worth of clouds flicker by in seconds—and it can take a long time to get the right shot. To a confused onlooker, the man standing in the dark with a tripod may look a bit suspicious.

“I’ve had a lot of run-ins with police,” he says. “Some of them have gotten used to me by now.”

Takano has been sharing his time-lapse videos since 2013, and they’ve been so popular that making them is now the aerospace engineering graduate’s full-time job. With his company, Highfield Media, he’s created videos for KXAN and the National Geographic Channel—and for the opening scenes of the Texas Exes’ own weekly UT news show, The Hook.

His latest is a nocturnal tour of Austin from sunset to sunrise. Takano says the three-minute video took a few hundred hours to create, including 70-80 hours of editing. There’s a stunning shot of the moon rising next to the Tower and another of the LBJ Library set against a pulsing purple sky. Take a look above, and also check out Takano’s other videos here and here.

Tags: Andrew Takano, skyline, timelapse, video