Port Tampa Bay: In Record Time!

If you live near Tampa Bay, you’ve probably seen the huge cargo ships transporting goods in and out of Port Tampa Bay. What you may not know, however, is how those ships load and unload with such efficiency. Shooting Stars Post, in partnership with the Port Tampa Bay, was tasked with capturing the dynamics of the MSC Tamara loading and unloading containers to showcase the new Post-Panamex gantry cranes in full operation. The perfect way to showcase this? Time-lapse video.

Time-lapse cinematography is a motion picture technique by which a naturally slow process, like the blossoming of a flower or the unloading of a cargo ship, can be seen at a greatly accelerated rate. Normal cinematography reproduces movement by recording and displaying it at 24 frames per second, but in time-lapse, single frames are recorded at much greater time intervals and then viewed at the standard 24 frames per second. Therefore, speeding up a slower process that might not be viewed previously in one sitting.

SSP used high-resolution cameras and motion control dollies at all angles throughout the day to capture the cargo ship unloading and the technology used to enable them to do so efficiently and effectively. Check out the time lapse video below, and follow us on Vimeo for more content!