Portland’s main government office building, the Portland Building, was one of the first major examples of post-modern architecture in the United States, designed by famed architect Michael Graves.
For a 30-month period ending in Spring, 2020, the building was significantly reconstructed, inside and out, to bring it up to modern standards and improve lighting and ventilation systems, while maintaining the integrity of the original design.
CONVEY: was hired by the city and the architecture firm overseeing the reconstruction to visually document the change in a long-scale time-lapse video. CONVEY: constructed a custom automated camera enclosure, situated in an office building across the street, which took a photo every 30 to 120 seconds over a period of over two years.
In the above documentary, produced independently by DLR Group Architecture, you can see the footage used in multiple segments, including at 11m14s, 14m46s, and 18m16s.
CONVEY: created custom software that allows creating different timelapse sequences following various parameters such as time-of-day (including adjustments for Daylight Savings Time), speed of progress, and position of the sun, to mine the many thousands of photos taken and create beautiful, meaningful videos. Several examples are below:
The Great Portlandia Cover-Up
This video covers the time period in which the Portlandia statue was surrounded by scaffolding and covered to protect it during construction.
Full Build – 1pm Each Day
This variation shows the complete reconstruction at a rate of 1-frame-per-day at 1pm, with 30 months passing in just 36 seconds.
“Single Day” Build
This variation creates the illusion of the building reconstructing itself in a single day, with the sun making a single arc from 4am to 10pm. At one frame per day, thirty months appear to pass in just 36 seconds.