One Week In Los Santos

I’ve always loved time lapse photography, and obviously I love games, so I thought – can I combine the two? This is the result: One Week In Los Santos.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/fjWi71oRJS8[/youtube]

After watching that, it’s hard to believe that this is the same game world that most people would closely associate with prostitutes, guns and drugs. Rockstar have created one of the most spectacular looking games I’ve ever seen, and they’ve done it all on the lowly old Xbox 360. Astonishing.

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For anyone interesting in the technical side of this, all I did was use an Elgato Game Capture HD connected to my Xbox 360 to record 48 minutes of footage at each in game location (that’s 24 in game hours). Then, I simply used iMovie to squeeze each clip down from forty eight minutes to one minute, and added music, titles, fades etc.

Problems I ran into:

• The Xbox 360 dims its screen after ten idle minutes, so I disabled that in the console settings
• Wireless controllers also turn themselves off, so I used a play and charge wire to prevent this
• In game phone calls would ruin the video, so I had to put the in game phone into sleep mode which prevents this. Annoyingly, although the display settings allow you to turn off the entire HUD, you can’t remove the small sleep mode icon, which is what you can see in the bottom left of the video
• There’s no first person view in GTA V, so these videos were all shot sitting inside a car, with the camera set to “bonnet camera”