Hello World! My name is Joey Wittmann and I am an artist and developer from Buffalo, New York (now based out of Los Angeles) with a strong interest in the temporal dimension and time in general. This has led to me experimenting a lot with timelapses, merging data, and other art projects over the years. Project LA365 is my biggest art project ever and I hope you join me for the journey. Right below this are links to both the livestream as well as the NFT page on Opensea.io, which will act as the main source of funding for this project. If you do find this project exciting I would greatly appreciate any contributions, whether that be through NFT sales, direct donation to my Ethereum address in the footer, or even just sharing the project with others. If the project seems exciting but you do not want to participate financially that is totally fine! I am grateful that you appreciate my work and took the time to check it out.
I'll go over some of my thoughts on this project and why I am choosing to take up the challenge. When it comes to timelapses the majority of them take place over the course of a few hours or sometimes a day. Only a small fraction of timelapses attempt anything larger due to it being much more difficult (on multiple levels) the longer you attempt to make it. My idea for this project was to figure out all of the challenges that come with making a year long timelapse at a high quality and document the process so that others could see what I did to make it happen and see what challenges I ran into along the way. I also want to provide the software I created to assist in this project as well as documentation on how to do something like this yourself from start to finish. The quality of the software will vary depending on the success of the project, but at the very least I plan on dumping my source code onto github under the apache license 2.0. As far as the actual project goes I want to provide all of the source data being captured as CC0, with the LA365 brand's copyright being held by me. This means that you are welcome to use any of the pictures or videos taken from the camera for your own projects, as long as you don't try to represent yourself as having any official connection to the LA365 project. The only problem with this is that even though I have a 1Gbps connection my upload is only 40Mbps, so there is really no practical way for me to get you the data other than by shipping it on a hard drive, which I would obviously charge for. (The project generates about 100Mbps on average, so not even a single copy could be uploaded.) Below I go into some of the stretch goals of this project, one of which is to host a server in a datacenter so there is actually a way for you to access the data, but that would mean this project was much more successful than I am anticipating, but you never know! If you do purchase a copy of the data from me you are also welcome to sell access to it to others. I have no problem with that since it is CC0 data.
Project specs:
Sony A7R4 with a 90mm lens capturing one RAW image at 61MP every 10 seconds. This is 8,640 pictures a day or 3,153,600 pictures over the course of the year. This equates to about 400TB of data, which is a lot.
The first year (2022) we will attempt 99% uptime, so only 3.65 days of missed images. I consider any time 3 or more images are missed in a row (40 second gap) to count as downtime. If I do make it to year two I would like to cut that down to 8h of downtime, but we'll think more about that once year one is completed.
One NFT released for every day in the year, with higher effort timelapses as well as specific 1/1's to come as well, although whether there are weekly timelapses, monthly timelapses, or other will depend on my access to compute resources as well as experimentation with software so that I can make long timelapses into NFTs that aren't flashing rapidly as the days whiz by at 1000x or even 1000000x speed. These 'daily' 1/1 NFTs will be images embedded in a trading card format that represent a moment or span of time taken from that day, and will include some other details as well. I'd like there to be a news section that indicates the importance of the day for Los Angeles, the US, and the World, so these cards will drop several days later so there is time to decide what to put on them. They also might not drop at a regular interval since I might not have time or the ability to do one every day. Each 'regular' daily card will have a randomized background based on the weather and average color data, so no two backgrounds will be the same. For holidays or special events there may also be backgrounds that are not generated, but these will be much more rare.
If it interests you I have probably spent around 200 hours coding, testing, planning, or working in some way on this project thus far. I don't consider it time lost since I have enjoyed it and it has been a great learning experience for me that has strengthened my abilities as a programmer. If we are tracking time tho that would be over a month of my life working at a 9-5. However I have also spent around $8000 on equipment and other supplies which will likely have little to no resale value, so currently I do consider that lost lol.
So what's the plan? There are a variety of goals I would like to achieve with this project, but some of them depend on how well the project is received and whether or not funding comes through. I will list them in the order that I plan to implement them, pending a financially successful project, and will only include goals that have not already been met so you will know where the money will go first if this project does gain popularity. First thing is first! Expand the storage capacity to support the first 8 months of capture, right now my NAS only has space for the first ~4 months, so this is the number one priority. I estimate this will cost an additional $6000. Next I would purchase a larger battery backup for all mission critical components that would allow power to be out for up to one day. I estimate the cost of this to be around $3000, and in the summer it may be necessary to keep myself from eclipsing the 3.65 days of downtime goal that I have set out for myself. Next is to expand storage again to make up for the last 4 months I will need to store. I estimate this will cost another $6000. After this point I would like to recoup the money already spent on equipment for this project, which as I mentioned above is around $8000. If I break-even my next purchase will be an EPYC server with lots of RAM so I can better keep up with all the data processing that will need to happen. I estimate this will cost around $15000-45000 depending on the business plan and if there is demand to create custom timelapses from viewer suggestions. After this point I start to wonder whether it makes sense to have things in any specific order since a lot of things can change, but I'll list out the rest of my aspirations for this project in case it interests you. I would like to form a nonprofit centered around free and open timelapse software development since I think there is a lot I could contribute to the timelapse space, even if there isn't a massive market for tools around it. I would use Blender as a template for this as it is a project I admire greatly and have been a Diamond level sponsor of for well over a year. That being said we would start much much smaller and I don't mean to imply that these two projects would be comparable in scope. I would also like to start more timelapse projects in other cities/around the world. I think volcano growth would be something especially interesting to capture, but that also presents a variety of other challenges on top of what city timelapses already have. As I mentioned above I would also like to make all this data, as well as machines for rent to do processing on, available and hosted in a datacenter at some point. I would like if this project could last upwards of 50 years, that would also very much be a stretch goal. One of my inspirations for starting this project is that I had seen a 100 or so year timelapse taken from roughly the same location, but since the camera was being moved a good distance and the time intervals were very random the result was not fluid, but it did look great considering the images they had access to! I think it would be awesome to see the skyline of Los Angeles get transformed over the next 50 years, but even just one year will be interesting, and is something I could do completely on my own, so that is what I've set out to do. Hopefully this gives you a good idea of what I'm thinking, and I hope to hear from some of you in the future. If you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to say gm don't hesitate to reach out! My handle is @Joey_Wittmann on twitter.