Watch the Weed Grow

 
Today I'm bringing you a short video: Many weeks in just a few seconds.

You'll see some Japanese knotweed growing up in the backyard. This plant can reach up to four meters in height and it's awfully fast at that: 10 to 30 cm a day are easily possible. (For Americans: That's 13 feet and 4 to 12 inches.) Perfect for a little timelapse video, I thought. But instead of filming just a single day I went for two months: At the beginning of March I started to take a photo of the area in question (almost) every day until the weed was finally up. Just to see if some acceptable result will come out. Well, it didn't turn out optimally, but still should do the trick. Here's the video, please watch it in best quality possible:



Originally I had a back-and-forth version with a pace of four weeks per second in there, but youtube's conversion process was butchering it even worse than the other parts.

By the way: As you can guess from the name, the plantlet isn't at home in Europe. Starting from gardens the knotweed has been spreading excessively fast, still is at it and preferably grows where nobody wants it. Unfortunately it's quite difficult to remove since the root system is reaching far and from every little piece that's missed a new colony can develop. But well, in case of emergency you can still go ahead and just eat it.

Making of:

Things I learned in the process:
1. Getting the exact same angle over the course of several weeks just is impossible that way.
2. Photoshop is able to align pictures automatically and it's fairly good at that.
(Maybe I'll adjust some of the pictures in this post later.)
3. Stop-motion movies should be recorded with the valuable camera + equipment in the future.
4. Even when it's clouded and the time is the same, lighting is always different every day.
5. If the lighting's changing permanently in rapid succession the video looks like ass when it's converted.

To close the post here's a knotweed leaf in lovely lighting.